Thaindian News

Aug 2 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Philanthropist brothers Sam and Charles Wyly have been building their image for many years as they funneled millions of dollars to colleges, art groups, literacy programs, and animals shelters, but investigators with the government have suspected for a long time that these two men were simply avoiding paying their taxes.

These two brothers were during the Great Depression one year apart, and their family had to give up the cotton farm they owned while the boys were still kids during a failing economy. They came out of that darkness to become billionaires. The two men became regular political donors, most often to the Republican party.

Now they are being named in a federal investigation which alleges that the two brothers were hiding over a half of a billion dollars in offshore accounts during their last 13 years of insider stock trading. The fall out from the arrest of these two, if it occurs, could be a huge hit to the Republican Party of Texas, since these two are major contributors.

The federal complaint, which is 78 pages long, was filed in New York City on Thursday, has a statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission which says, :The Wylys held and traded tens of millions of shares in companies on whose boards they served and “defrauded the investing public” by misrepresenting their ownership and trading of those stocks and using “an elaborate sham system of trusts and subsidiary companies” offshore, according to ‘CBSNews’.

Their attorney, William A Brewer III calls the charges completely “without merit and added, “They have never been given any reason to believe the financial transactions in question were anything other than legal and fully appropriate.”

The brothers Wyly, Charles, who is 76 and Sam who is 75, along with their wives have donated almost $2.5 million dollars to over 200 Republican Party candidates and committees at the federal level over the past twenty years. They say that they have given over 10 million dollars to Republicans since the 1970s.