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Why a grown man slipped out from behind an abandoned house on a sunny Thursday afternoon was anyone’s guess until a woman stumbled after him from behind a bush.
“You still have to pay me!” – she shouted and adjusted the straps of her bra. The teenagers in the house next door raised their phones to take them off, and she grumbled about an act that was impossible to mention in polite company.
“I told you there were prostitutes,” one of the teenagers told me. She didn’t want to scold, but that was the feeling. I spent a week trying to find who actually owns 1045 Ashby Grove and all I found was a hooker and John.
Georgia Business Journal
I began studying Ilimite after the massive leak of documents known as the Panama Papers revealed how world leaders, Russian money launderers and others set up shell companies in faraway countries to hide their assets. What is less well known is that in the US it is often not necessary to go abroad to do business secretly. Opening a type of business entity known as a limited liability company or LLC, such as Ilimite, can do the trick.
With the support of business and government leaders, state legislatures across the country have passed laws that make it harder for the public to identify the people behind LLCs — and who to blame when those companies go wrong. In New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the super-rich use LLCs to buy luxury homes to avoid taxes, launder money or violate building codes.
Closer to home, speculators use LLCs to buy up run-down homes and avoid fines if they are deemed unsafe. There is a $100 cost to start in Georgia, which must be paid to the Secretary of State. No ID is required and no responsibility such as CEO or partner need to be disclosed. In 2015, 84,000 LLCs registered in this state, compared to about 57,000 10 years earlier.
I stopped by a house in west Atlanta because I hoped my peeping had made whoever was behind Unlimited nervous enough to fix things. No such luck. The same condom wrapper from a week ago was lying next to the mailbox without a mailbox. The front door was still open, the sockets were still knocked out in the walls, and the same empty vodka bottles were lying on the floor in the living room.
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Ilimite LLC, a company with an invalid address, owns 1045 Ashby Grove in southwest Atlanta. Authorities have been trying to find his owner for years.
You can be sentenced to prison for owning or operating a place like this, although few do. (Buckhead speculator Rick Warren, convicted of violating the code last fall, is the exception, not the rule.)
There are many reasons why scofflaw owners escape prosecution, but in the case of 1045 Ashby Grove and the nearly 800 others pending in the city of Atlanta code, it’s because the police can’t find anyone to arrest.
“You can’t put a LLC in jail. You have to have a person,” said Police Maj. Barry Shaw, the city’s chief of code enforcement, when I visited their office behind Turner Field. I’m good at finding people, so I thought I’d look for a host.
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Law enforcement officials consider Ilimite a prime example of an LLC that doesn’t work. State and local records show the company was incorporated on Sept. 18, 2012, bought 10 properties a few days later and was dissolved by the state in February because it never paid any of its $50 annual dues.
When Ilimite was last charged with code violations at the Ashby Grove home, no one bothered to show up in court, said Rachel Davenport, a code enforcement officer who is one of the department’s five investigators. For more than two years, she handled 15 to 20 cases a week, repeatedly trying to track down Ilimite owners through public records, police databases and phone calls.
Taxpayers will have to pay to clean up or demolish 1,045 Ashby groves because authorities can’t find its owner. BEN GRAY / [email protected]
State corporate disclosure laws didn’t help. Each LLC is supposed to provide the Georgia Secretary of State’s office with the name and address of its registered agent, the person designated to receive official notices for the business. This is a starting point for researchers, even though these agents often have no other connection to the LLC owners and are not required to disclose who their owners are.
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“You can ask, but that’s it,” Davenport said, pointing to Unlimited’s recording with the secretary of state:
Its main office was a Roswell building owned by another LLC. No one responded to recent notices sent there by law enforcement, Davenport said.
“It seems like part of the game is to bury yourself in layers and never find yourself,” Shaw said.
Limited liability companies in Georgia must file the name and address of their registered agents with the Secretary of State. Ltd. “Ilimite” did not. | HANDOUTS
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Ashview Heights resident Elizabeth Whitmore talks with neighbor David Gregory in front of the home he and his partner restored. Residents discovered that about 75 percent of the damaged properties were owned by LLCs.
These layers can grow deeper. LLCs have long been allowed to own other LLCs, and now changes to the law proposed by the Georgia Secretary of State would allow an LLC to be the registered agent of another LLC. You can connect LLC after LLC in a chain to nowhere.
“This is not what LLCs were designed for,” said Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama law professor who advised lawmakers in several states on the first laws to create such companies.
At the time, only large businesses had the money to pay lawyers to avoid so-called double taxation, where owners are taxed on their profits at the company level and as individuals. Hamill supported LLCs because they provided this advantage to small businesses while protecting owners from personal liability for their companies’ debts.
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But she was disappointed when states joined what she sees as a race to the bottom to make it easier for owners to hide their identities. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office does not verify addresses or identities on company filings, and does not impose penalties for providing incorrect or misleading information.
“LLCs used to be quite transparent. And the tendency has been to abandon that, which has led to what’s happening in Atlanta,” Hamill said.
Elizabeth Whitmore reacts to a pile of used condoms visible through the open door of 1045 Ashby Grove. An IT consultant finds out who owns a blighted property in her neighborhood. BOB ANDRES / [email protected]
I shared this with Ashview Heights resident Elizabeth Whitmore, whom I caught up with on my day off as an IT consultant. The 25-year-old graduate of Atlanta’s Clark University bought the home in Atlanta’s west side three years ago because of its potential as an in-town property with easy access to downtown. On the east side, renovated Craftsman homes like those on Ashby Grove sell for $300,000 and up.
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“It made a lot of sense for me to invest in this area,” Whitmore told me when we met outside the Ashby Grove home, which is around the corner from her home. “Did I know what I was getting into? No. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
Whitmore and her neighbors began working as volunteer spies, tracking down the murdered owners through the Internet and other sources. She estimates that 75 percent of the blighted homes the team investigates are owned by LLCs, with some owning 10 or more properties. This often happens when the trail cools down.
I mentioned one of my clues—an address in Roswell—and Whitmore rolled her eyes. We’ve both seen investors from wealthier, whiter places run slums in historically black areas of Atlanta. She wanted me to send a message to the owner:
The Roswell address was a 45-minute drive from Ashview Heights in a well-kept cluster of suburban office suites with pleasant forest views. I didn’t have an appointment, but real estate attorney David J. Reid doesn’t seem to mind. He told me he never owned an Ilimite or visited 1045 Ashby Grove, but he represented the company “years and years ago.”
Georgia Llc Annual Report
Code enforcement citations have come to his office for years, sometimes in his name, he said. At one point, he threatened to sue the city.
“There should be no possibility of accusing a person of a crime
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