More Walker donor/bad WEDC loan links reported
Valuable reporting by the invaluable Wisconsin Democracy Project:
Executives from five companies whose $5.6 million in state loans were forgiven by the Walker administration contributed nearly $18,000 to the governor’s campaign since January 2010.As I've said, if we had a real Attorney General...
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The article from WI Democracy Campaign appears to list loans that were written-off by WEDC. (These were mostly loans issued by the old Dept of Commerce, because WEDC hasn't been around long enough to write-off much bad debt of its own yet.) I think they're getting the list of written-off loans from this MJS story:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-jobs-agency-has-written-off-76-million-in-loans-b99506132z1-306381241.html
Note that it's not quite accurate to say these loans were "forgiven."
In addition to paying off a loan as agreed, there are 3 main things that can happen:
1) The loan can be amended/extended to allow more time
2) The loan can be forgiven, usually requiring that the original loan contract had a provision for forgiving the loan if certain job-creation criteria are met
3) The loan is determined uncollectable, and written off as bad debt (sometimes it can be transferred to another agency to pursue collection, but it's no longer on WEDC's books)
So far as I'm aware, we only have a list of loans that fall under #3. If we could see all the loans that fall under #1 and #2, there might be some real bombshells in there.
It sounds like WEDC didn't even try and collect these loans, just wrote them off. Why didn't they litigate them, under the old Commerce dept they could have had state attny's go after them or assets. They didn't try to recoop this money because Walker and his minions are incompetent. There should be a through audit of what activity was done to collect these loans. This is criminal, that money would have helped schools.
Good point. Is this grounds for a class-action suit to get OUR money back?
It's definitely all the more reason why the Feds have to step in and do a full-scale graft and RICO investigation.
Some of us did vote for the person who would have taken this on. None of us thought Brad Schimmel would ever do anything but draw his enormous salary as state AG. Six months in and that's all he's doing. Pay for play is alive and well, and well documented in Wisconsin, but nobody in authority cares.
Why is this not a bigger deal with the state's citizenry and media? Are they too googly-celebrity eyed to care?
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