Citizens United applicability to 100% foreign owned US corporations? Citizens United said that US corporations can spend unlimited &quot;independent expenditures for political campaigns&quot;. However, foreign natural persons and foreign corporations are not allowed to spend any independent expenditures for US political campaigns. Even buying merchandise from a presidential candidate's campaign website would be illegal for a foreign natural person or a foreign corporation. However, for a US corporation that is 100% owned by foreign natural persons, does Citizens United apply? What about 99%, 98%, 97%, .... ?
From https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/ A domestic subsidiary of a foreign corporation (or a domestic corporation owned by foreign nationals) may make donations and disbursements in connection with state or local elections (if permissible under state and local law) provided that: These activities are not financed in any part by the foreign parent or owner; and Individual foreign nationals are not involved in any way in the making of donations to nonfederal candidates and committees.
Like many US legal questions, there is a Congressional Research Service report about this. It is not generally a violation of US law to do things in another country where the only connection with the US is that the offender is a US citizen. However, there are a number of general situations where the US has jurisdiction over federal crimes if either the victim or offender is a US citizen: if a place isn't within the jurisdiction of any country (e.g. Antarctica); a place used by a US government entity (like an embassy or airbase); crimes by American soldiers and those employed by or accompanying the military; etc. These are considered to be within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US. Other laws apply if they say so. For instance, any US national committing war crimes inside or outside the US can be punished under US law; ditto for treason. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it illegal for a US national to bribe a foreign official anywhere outside the US for business reasons (if it's inside the US, there are more requirements). For instance, you aren't allowed to pay kickbacks to a foreign government's acquisition officer to buy your product. The CRS report has more (it doesn't include the FCPA, but that appears to be an oversight). Note that extraterritorial jurisdiction doesn't just apply if the person is a US national. US laws can also confer it if the victim is a US national, if the offense has a significant US component, if it's directed towards the US, if it's in violation of international law and the offender later turns up in the US, etc. For your scenarios: Dual citizenship doesn't matter. A US citizen is a US citizen, and is required to obey all laws that apply to US citizens, unless those laws explicitly exempt dual citizens. A dual citizen isn't treated differently by the government; as far as the US government is concerned, their US citizenship is all that matters (except for certain specific purposes like security clearances). In Kawakita v. United States, a US-Japanese dual citizen was convicted of treason against the US for aiding Japan in WWII. Depends. Plenty of these laws have no requirement that anything related to the crime actually happen in the US; for sex tourism, the subsection about traveling in foreign commerce for the purposes of engaging in illicit sexual conduct is followed by a subsection about engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. "Travel with the purposes of X" or "with intent to X" means you must have intended to do X at the time you traveled, but most extraterritorial laws don't control travel with intent to X (they cover X directly). Depends on the law. Some laws (like child sex tourism) apply to any permanent resident of the US as well as any citizen. Some apply to anyone, because they're based on a conspiracy started in the US. Others apply just to US nationals; a noncitizen isn't bound by them (for instance, no one but a US national can be charged with treason against the US, for obvious reasons). Still others apply to anyone who later turns up in the US, even if that is literally the only connection between the US and the offense (this is basically reserved for crimes against international law, like genocide).
In most US states, anyone can buy such lists, covering either the whole state or a specific municipality or election district. Political campaigns routinely buy such lists and use them to organize door-to-door campaigning, as well as postal appeals. Some years ago I was a (losing) candidate for local office in NJ. I bought such a list covering the township I was running in. It showed each voter's name, address, age, party of registration, if any, and which of the last several elections the person had voted in. I think the lists were available from the board of elections, and local lists from municipal clerks. Exact procedures no doubt differ from state to state, as will costs. At that time lists were available in electronic and paper formats. Purchasers had to sign an agreement not to use the information for commercial marketing, as I recall. Updated lists including data from the latest election are not usually available at once, but are available long before the next general election.
It is legal. 18 USC Chapter 17 contains laws regarding what you can/cannot do with US legal tender. It doesn't mention anything about buying, or selling US tender at or above the face value. And there are several businesses in the USA that do this (coin exchanges which purchase coins at less then face value and give you dollar bills in return, etc...). However I would be concerned that your action might look like money laundering to the customs official on your way back home. Or on the way going to the foreign country for that matter. Which could be very bad for you. I would talk to a lawyer about this.
Embezzlement is criminally prohibited by 18 USC 666, and this DoJ manual page on what is embezzlement cites the answer in Moore v. United States, 160 U.S. 268 that Embezzlement is the fraudulent appropriation of property by a person to whom such property has been entrusted, or into whose hands it has lawfully come. It differs from larceny in that the original taking was lawful, or with the consent of the owner, while in larceny the felonious intent must have existed at the time of the taking Following other case law, the elements of the crime are there was a trust or fiduciary relationship between the defendant and the private organization or State or local government agency; the property came into the possession or care of the defendant by virtue of his/her employment; the defendant's dealings with the property constituted a fraudulent conversion or appropriation of it to his/her own use; and the defendant acted with the intent to deprive the owner of the use of this property. This page lists over 32,000 disbursements; filtering just for rent give over 2,400 disbursements, a number of which are recent and made to some business with Trump in the name (Trump Tower LLC etc). The conversion would have to be fraudulent to be embezzlement. There actually is not any evidence provided that a transfer violated FEC regulations (we have dates, amounts, and recipient), so we would have to speculate about what else is true. There are processed disbursement images up to 10/21/2020 such as this receipt for 3 charges for food and lodging paid to Trump Hotel Collection. In fact this payment was made by Donald J Trump for President, Inc. although the search term was the aforementioned PAC: I will overlook that anomaly. This is the FEC page on that committee (you have to follow the committee number because the name was also used in the 2016 campaign but was terminated). There vast numbers of filings linked there, but nothing that I saw indicates that Trump is in any sense an employee of the organization, so there is no actual evidence that there were any &quot;Trump actions&quot;. First, it would have to be shown that there were Trump actions. Second, it would have to be show that the action was fraudulent. Technical misappropriation is not fraudulent. This FEC page describes the safe harbor provisions for misappropriation. This page specifically addresses embezzlement. Although they use the word &quot;embezzlement&quot;, they do not purport that misappropriation constituted embezzlement as defined above, to point out that civil penalties may result from violation, see 11 CFR Part 104. Ultimately, the legal propriety of the disbursements depends on its purpose: here is what the FEC say about illegal conversion for personal use (food for daily consumption, mortgage or rent for personal residence, tuition...). The available evidence does not even suggest embezzlement.
It's not illegal to say things in your profile. SE requires you to license your content to them on a non-exclusive basis pursuant to CC BY-SA 4.0. &quot;Non-exclusive&quot; means that you can also license the material to others on some other basis, e.g. CC0. In that case, a person who uses your material can rely on the other license that you granted. If SE wanted to, it could prohibit putting licenses in a user profile, in which case you would have to promulgate your more generous license elsewhere.
Non-Profits Need Not Have Owners But Must Have A Lawful Purpose Any non-profit company, for example, a 501(c)(3), is ownerless and can be run by a self-perpetuating board if desired, rather than having delegates that provide an outside source for new board members. In that case you have to set forth a purpose of the company or trust, to which its assets and profits must be used, and it must be managed in accordance with that purpose. You can also have a "private foundation" that is effectively ownerless, again with a designated charitable purpose. Generally speaking, the law limits how much compensation can be paid to officers and employees of such a company and restricts self-dealing transactions by such a company. You probably cannot create a valid trust or business with no beneficiaries and no designated charitable purpose which is supposed to merely accumulate its profits and assets. Ownerless Cooperatives Are An Oxymoron Your reference in this and other posts to an "ownerless cooperative" is basically an oxymoron. A cooperative is an entity owned by a class of people who have a contractual relationship with the entity (usually consumers or producers) who are the owners of the company with voting control and who are entitled to an adjustment of their transaction prices with the cooperative via a rebate or surplus check proportionate to the dollar volume of their dealings with the cooperative (Northwest Mutual, must rural electric companies, and most credit unions would be examples of consumer cooperatives, Ocean Spray is a good example of a producers cooperative). An ownerless entity is pretty much by definition not a cooperative. An excellent overview of forms of entity organization other than investor owned stock corporations can be found in The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. The Life Of The Law Is Not Math Or Logic Honestly, it sounds like, in your several posts on the subject, that you are attempting the hide the ball of an ulterior purposes which is material to the legality and organization of an entity. The law is not like science or mathematics. You can't prove a bunch of isolated propositions and then string them together logically. The law operates on an entire comprehensive "fact pattern" and even if every step of your chain of reasoning to an ultimately result is supported by legal authority, this does not mean that this will be the result you get when you put all of the pieces together. That kind of logical reasoning doesn't work in a legal context. The heading of this section is a paraphrase of a famous statement about the law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. from "The Common Law" (1881) at page 1. Blockchains Are Not The Legal Innovation That They Claim To Be Using blockchain technology to manage "tokens" of voting control in an entity is ultimately completely irrelevant. Blockchain technology is just another alternative to certificated shares, shares kept on an ownership ledger, or shares kept through secondary shareholding intermediaries or brokers. The technology used to keep track of voting control or economic ownership is irrelevant, and some common entities (e.g. homeowner's associations) have ownership that is basically determined via a crude public blockchain called the county clerk and recorder's records. People who think that blockchains provide any significant legal innovation into anything (e.g. here) are fundamentally misguided and typically are not people familiar with the law who have misconceptions about how the law works. Also, contrary to the hype, blockchains are not fraud-proof and indeed, involve serious systemic risks of instability because an error in an old transaction can disrupt lots of current claims. Claims such as those made here that blockchain transactions are irrefutable are naive and basically false. A block chain is a bit like a real property record system without an adverse possession rule to make ancient glitches irrelevant. Moreover, blockchains are a solution to a non-problem. Authenticating ownership and voting rights, economic entitlements, and corporate actions is something that has never posed a very significant economic problem ever since writing was invented. These are economic problems that were already effectively solved in the days of the Minoans, and widespread ownership of well authenticated entities by numerous ever shifting groups of owners was a problem well in hand by the days of the British East India Company. Anonymous Ownership Or Contribution Records Are Illegal Truly anonymous ownership, however, is legally prohibited, even though ownership need not be made a matter of public record. In the case of for profit entities, by securities regulation which requires disclosure for purposes of exercising voting rights and for disclosing large blocks of ownership as required by law, and for purposes of tax law. In the case of non-profit entities, it is prohibited by virtue of laws regulating private foundations that impose tax requirements when certain concentrations of contributions come from a small, related group of people. In the case of political organizations, campaign finance laws require disclosure.
The Cayman Islands are well known as a tax haven. They have a corporate tax of 0%, and that includes income from abroad. So by moving your company officially to the Cayman Islands, you can avoid to pay a lot of taxes. Now of course most other countries will still send you a tax bill for any income you make with business activities within their borders. But there are accounting tricks to get around that. For example, many countries only tax profits, not revenue. So you can reduce your annual profits of your national subsidiaries to zero by having them pay money to your company on the caymans. For example, you can transfer your trademark to your subsidiary on the Cayman Islands and then have your subisdiaries in all other countries pay the Cayman company an annual license fee for using that brand name. And the license fee happens to be just so expensive that your national taxable profits become zero. And no, that's not just a Chinese thing. Corporations all around the world use that method to avoid taxes.