The White House-Kodak Controversy Has a New Angle: A Billionaire's Huge Stock Gift to a Synagogue
Source: Mother Jones
Corporations 2 hours ago
The White House-Kodak Controversy Has a New Angle: A Billionaire's Huge Stock Gift to a Synagogue
Why did investor George Karfunkel donate shares worth up to $180 million to a little-known congregation?
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau Chief
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In late July, a wild chain of events occurred when the Trump administration decided to give Eastman Kodak, the film giant that went bankrupt in 2012, an unprecedented $765 million government loan through the Defense Production Act. Under this deal, which President Trump touted, the company would manufacture ingredients for an assortment of drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug Trump has repeatedly promoted--without scientific support--as a treatment for COVID-19. The agreement was officially announced on July 28, but the previous day, the price of Kodak's stock began to surge, following local media leaks about the loan in Rochester, New York (the home of Kodak). This buying frenzy continued for a couple of days. During that time, billionaire investor George Karfunkel, a member of Kodak's board of directors, made an unusual transaction: He donated 3 million Kodak shares--worth up to $180 million at the time--to a relatively new Jewish congregation that has almost no public profile.
The out-of-the-ordinary loan for Kodak came from a new and little-known government agency: the US International Development Finance Corporation. This outfit was created to provide foreign aid--not domestic assistance--and it is headed by Adam Boehler, a former roommate of Jared Kushner. In March, Kushner tapped Boehler to be part of his shadow coronavirus task force.
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The turbulent trading began on July 27, as news of the loan seeped out. Kodak's stock opened at $2.13 and closed at $2.62, with 1,645,700 shares traded--more than 20 times the volume of previous days. On July 28, with the word now out officially, the stock opened at $9.63, hit a high of $11.80, and then dropped to $7.94, which was an almost four-fold gain from the start of the previous day, with a whopping 284,666,800 shares traded. The next day, July 29, was crazier. Kodak shares started at $18.43, and at one point reached an eye-popping peak of $60. Its low that day was $17.50, and it closed at $33.20, with 276,020,100 shares in play. But then investors realized that Kodak's agreement was not yet a done deal, and over the next few days, the stock declined and stabilized in the $15 region.
In the middle of this spree, Karfunkel, a major investor in Kodak, and his wife, Renee, donated those 3 million shares to an entity called Congregation Chemdas Yisroel, according to an SEC filing. They did so on July 29, the day the stock price hit $60, so those shares could have been worth as much as $180 million at the time of the gift. If the donation was executed at the end of the trading day, its value would have been $99.6 million. Given that Congregation Chemdas Yisroel is registered as a tax-exempt religious organization, the Karfunkels will be able to claim this donation as a tax deduction. That means they could pocket a deduction between $52.5 million and $180 million for a bloc of stocks that two days earlier was worth $6.39 million. (The donation also lowered the Karfunkels' holdings in Kodak to 4.4 percent--which is below the 5 percent threshold that requires investors in a publicly traded company to report their stock transactions.)
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Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/white-house-kodak-controversy-george-karfunkel-stock-gift/
Hat tip, Joe.My.God.
Massive Donation By Kodak Exec Spurs More Questions
August 11, 2020
https://www.joemygod.com/2020/08/massive-donation-by-kodak-exec-spurs-more-questions/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I still have stock options at $62 a share from when I retired. What a golden parachute that was, huh? 
All of this would create fewer than 300 jobs in Rochester. The area isn't exactly impoverished. At one time Kodak did buy Bayer. That got sold off in Kodak's asset fire sale. Kodak does hold patents on pharmaceutical drugs, and I don't believe they were all sold off. I worked in R&D and Kodak had patents in so many different platforms it was amazing. They were a dinosaur though, and didn't see the future when it was staring them right in the face. They held just about every digital photography patent, but decided it was just a "fad", and stuck with silver-halide film. What a bunch of dunderheads! 
