Legality of spending public money on private enterprise I am wondering about spending public money on private enterprise. In particular, for the city of Santa Fe, NM, USA. The enterprise is an indoor soccer franchise. The city is being asked to cover the $250k to $500k renovations and rent back time to the soccer clubs. The ROI would be 40+ years (based on the numbers in the article). For reasons not entirely evident, the mayor is pushing hard for this. There are lots of outdoor, full size soccer facilities in Santa Fe. Can you describe legal ways in which this might be challenged?
The government is allowed to spend public money on private enterprise. For example, the Small Business Administration gives grants to qualified businesses. Stadium subsidies have been a feature of government operations for decades, running in the billions of dollars. Here is a list of various larger businesses that received government bailouts. There is a procedure for approving such expenditures, such as the legislature of a state or city council. The mayor cannot usually unilaterally declare that the city will spend money on such a project, unless the city council has created a discretionary fund for the mayor, to support projects that the mayor deems will &quot;benefit the city&quot;. Unless there is some flagrantly illegal about the funding, there is probably no legal means to challenge the decision in court, it is a purely political matter. In rare circumstances (like this) a law can be passed that limits making stadium construction a taxpayer duty.
What §670 BGB basically says is that the default is that companies have to reimburse you for expenses that you incurred for interviewing with them. If they don't want to reimburse you, they have to tell you so in writing before you incur any costs. That way it's your decision if you still want to go if you have to pay for expenses yourself. It does not mean your expenses have to be paid, it means you should know beforehand whether they will be paid. So what I take from your story is that you never actually asked the company for reimbursement, expecting the Agentur für Arbeit to pay that for you. Well, no company is going to pay your expenses if you don't ask for it. And that's not a crime. You also never told the Agentur für Arbeit that you were not informed beforehand that your expenses would not be paid. They asked for proof, you delivered proof. It's not their job to find out how or when you got handed this written statement and if that constitutes a violation of §670. And as a little reality check: paying your expenses (probably something along the lines of a cab fare or bus ticket?) is way more cost effective for the AA than suing a small company for the same amount. Just the time of the lawyer filing the suit will probably cost more than your public transportation ticket for the next year.
It would depend on how the ownership contract is written. 30% sounds like a minority stake, so I don't know how they could block new investments unless the contract requires a super-majority to approve new rounds of financing. How does the remaining 70% of ownership feel about this? If they are abiding by the terms of the ownership contract I don't see that this is questionable behavior on their part. This is a business relationship. Business partners may come to have different outlooks on the future of the company, and the best way to protect their investment. Consider flipping the viewpoint: "I'm a minority owner in a company I no longer have confidence in. I would like to dissolve the company and sell off the assets to re-coup as much of my original investment as I can. The other owners want to chase this to the bitter end, and do a new round of financing, which will significantly dilute my shares, without (in my opinion) giving the company a real chance of success. What can I do?" When the founder of your friend's company accepted money for shares in the company, they gave up absolute control over the company's direction. Assuming none of the parties are acting in violation of the ownership contract, the most reasonable way to resolve a conflict like this is to buy out the dissenting shareholders.
There is no general rule about ownership: one parking lot I know is owned by the city, another is owned by the company that operates the mall, and in a third case it is owned by a third party who doesn't operate the mall. Either way, the owner of the parking lot has the property right to limit how it is used, and their agents (security guards, for example) can request that you refrain from skateboarding. They can evict you; they may not have the legal authority to physically toss you off the property, but they can probably perform a citizen's arrest for trespassing. None of this depends on how many cars are in the parking lot. It is more likely that a governmentally-owned parking lot will have a corresponding law restricting its use (whereas in the case of a private parking lot, restrictions center around general property law and the law of trespass).
"Public space" is not a relevant criteria when considering trespass or other crimes/torts against property. The relevant criteria is who owns it and what they allow you to do on it. All land in the USA is owned by someone. That someone may be a government; that does not make it a public space - Camp David is owned by the US government; it is certainly not public. The owner of the land can decide (subject to the law) who has access to their land and in what circumstances. If they erect a fence then they are saying "You cannot access my land here" - if you ignore this then you are trespassing. This is true even if there are legitimate ways to access the land i.e. there is a place where there isn't a fence; to avoid trespass you would have to access the land from there. If you think of this in terms of a public building like a courthouse you are free to enter through the unlocked front doors but not by climbing through a window. The trespass is in the act of crossing the fence - that is the act that you have been implicitly denied permission to do. Being on one side or the other is not trespass. For the specific image that you show it is quite likely that those roads are owned by different people - the highway is probably owned by the state while the cul-de-sac is a local government road.
A receipt is just a written proof that money was taken. It is hard to imagine a place on Earth where the legality of giving such a proof would be questionable at all so that you would need to talk about an "authority to issue receipts". Only if you find a place where money itself is illegal. Now, the real question here is whether such receipts (issued by private persons not registered as businesses) can be used for accounting purposes, e.g. to claim that your business, which transacted with those persons, incurred expenses. The mere fact that sole traders need to be registered to do business does not outlaw the use of receipts issued by non-registered persons. For example, your business could be buying old stuff from the public (used cars, electronics etc.) and refurbishing it. Provided that this activity itself is not illegal, receiving receipts from those one-off private sellers, and using them in your bookkeeping would be perfectly legal too.
No. Just because some building is "owned by the public" or State, doesn't mean it's public property. A state's national guard installation comes to mind immediately. State workers' offices are not public places. Airport hangars/buildings/runways. You can't just go hang out in the DPW garages.
Usually, the only reason to set up an &quot;ownerless&quot; corporation is to set up a non-profit. Non-profit corporations can have self-perpetuating boards and are very similar to charitable trusts. If it ends up without any board members and has a self-perpetuating board, any person affected by the corporation or a suitable government representative (in the U.S., usually a state attorney general in the place of incorporation) can apply to a court to have new board members appointed. In a &quot;for profit&quot; context, this generally doesn't happen because the people investing in the company want to be able to profit from it and/or obtain a return of their investment. So, the question is largely hypothetical in that case.