Matt Levine, Columnist

Money Stuff: Fake Solar Generators Generated Fake Tax Breaks

January 28, 2020 at 5:26 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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We have talked about it before, but I really cannot resist the elegance and financial-engineering purity of the DC Solar Ponzi scheme, whose masterminds were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors last Friday. (They pleaded guilty and settled with the SEC.) The SEC summarizes:

Uh. No. That’s not right. They weren’t luring investors by associating themselves with trendy technologies, and their fraud was not an old and simple Ponzi. They were luring investors with tax fraud, and in a sense the Ponzi element was the least important part of it. In fact they never made any Ponzi payments. It’s much better than that.