Senate candidate Miller's mysterious Mat-Su hideaway

[bigworld]

Source: Alaska Dispatch

For the past 14 years, U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miler has owned or controlled 40 acres with a two-story house near Willow, but he does not report it in his Senate financial disclosure statements.

The deed for the property is recorded in the name of something called "The Wilmington Trust," but the woman named as the trustee says she had no idea of the exact nature of her legal connections and obligations to the property. Whether a trust actually exists is unclear.

The land and cabin are currently valued by the Matanuska Susitna Borough at $57,500, though Miller once tried to sell the property for significantly more. And though not reported on his Senate disclosure forms, the property has in the past been reported by Miller in state financial disclosure records.

When he took a job as a state magistrate in the late 1990s, he filed an Alaska Public Offices Commission report that listed the owners of the property as three of his children and their interest in the property as a "trust.'' The property was at that time reported to be vacant. In the years that followed, Miller added additional children to the list of named owners, and changed the state of the property from a trust to an "ownership-trust,'' or an "ownership, trust.'' The property was reported to be a "rental'' in a 1999 report and a "rental-farm" in a 2000 report.

Read more: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/politics/7250-senate-candidate-millers-mysterious-mat-su-hideaway?showall=1

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This the type of person Alaskans might elect to be their next senator:

Hrncir didn't really want to sell for the cut-rate price being offered, but he felt that he had to. And he perfectly understood the low-ball offer; business is business.

What followed wasn't, at least not by Alaska standards. The deal was made in Willow, Hrncir said, but he met Miller in Anchorage at the Denny's on Dimond Boulevard to sign the papers to close the sale. Up to that point, Hrncir said, he'd always found the Anchorage lawyer a friendly guy. That changed the second the legal documents were inked.

Hrncir told Miller he planned to go back to Caswell to get the last of the family's stuff out of the cabin, including the generator Hrncir had said all along he planned to take with him. Miller told Hrncir that he was to stay off the property.

Accustomed to an old Alaska where a man's handshake is his word, Hrncir was taken aback, but he didn't fight.

"He schemed me out of that,'' Hrncir said. "He pulled out a paper and said it said (sold) 'where is, as is.' Legally he was right, (but) he went from a friend to a legal counsel in a minute.''

[Bozita]

1. Isn't there an Alaska Bar Association? Are they paying attention?