Terry McAuliffe has every reason to promote green energy; he started an electric-car company, GreenTech Automotive. The website touts that these cars are "Made in the USA", but much of the money used to build them has been raised by promising citizenship to foreign investors. Hmmm...
McAuliffe uses The Federal EB-5 Program to raise money for GreenTech. The program allows citizenship for wealthy foreign nationals that invest in making jobs in America. Sounds a little fishy, but down that road we go.
The problem is, none of this money is transparent, and accountability for it is near zero. For example, 20 million dollars raised (supposedly) for McAuliffe's company has yet to be delivered to GreenTech from Gulf Coast Funds Management, a financial firm conveniently Presided over by Terry's long-time friend Anthony Rodham (Hillary's little brother) and with long time Clinton friends and advisors Margaret Richardson and Kathleen Blanco on the board of directors. Both companies are regional centers for EB-5, and records for their success or failure are nowhere to be found. Outright suspicious, but the road goes on.
The address listed for the offices has been stripped of a nameplate, locked, and turned dark. The tiny closet-like office that Kenric Ward of Breitbart finally uncovered "was occupied by a lone receptionist who curtly and repeatedly declared that 'no one' was available to be interviewed." In a report, earlier this week, a financial adviser went as far as to call McAuliffe's investment program (EB-5) a fraud. A dubious financial record, now we are in familiar Terry-tory.
Rodham's Gulf Coast Funds Management is being looked into by Fairfax County's Department of Tax Administration. It was delinquent of its 2012 business license; neither company has paid for one in 2013.By its own description, the company is meant to serve "targeted zones" in Louisiana and Mississippi...so why is it headquartered in McLean? Anyone seeing the pattern here?
The EB-5 program, itself has come under extreme scrutiny in the past year, and several government reports have turned a skeptical eye to the lack of transparency, and the ease with which fraud can be committed within the system. And that is under the best of circumstances.
There are standards of job creation for EB-5, but as the formula used to test these standards includes jobs that were not made by the foreign investor, and was basically invented to meet the statutory job-to-investment requirements that were imposed, the Government Accountability Office reported that it could not determine how many people had actually been put to work by the program. The more that gets uncovered, the less becomes apparent...
GreenTech has been described as not a good fit for EB-5 anyway; the long-term funding that he needs just isn't what the system was meant for. Its possible that the operation has been misused or taken advantage of the whole time. McAuliffe's company pledged to hire 350 full-time workers in Mississippi, and GreenTech has never yet disclosed how many employees it actually has.
All that we can say for sure is that none of this adds up, and that the McAuliffe campaign has been mum on every word of it. Everyone is keeping their lips unusually tightly locked for Terry. Why? What could he possibly be hiding? The only way this road ends is with McAuliffe coming clean about whatever is going on in this closed door, suspicious looking enterprise. Especially since regulators have already uncovered fraud in a similar organization recently. McAuliffe simply is not good for Virginia.
VA GOP Caucus
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