Beanie Baby Founder Pleads Guilty To Tax Evasion [VIDEO]; Billionaire Entrepreneur Will Pay 53.6 Million Dollar Penalty; Have You Sold Your Hot Beanie Babies Yet?

Beanie Baby Founder pleads guilty to Tax Evasion: Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner is guilty in tax evasion case.  While the unpaid taxes on his Swiss bank account came to just under a million dollars, the Beanie Baby Founder will pay over 53 million dollars as a penalty.  

Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner never finished college, but he started Ty Inc. in 1985 and became a billionaire in the 1990s after creating Beanie stuffed animals, which set off a craze.  People talked of investing in rare beanie babies and paid large sums for them.

Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner went on to found Ty Warner Hotels & Resorts, which owns luxury properties such as Four Seasons hotels in New York and Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Beanie Baby Founder tax evasion case is the latest in a U.S. crackdown on using offshore accounts for tax evasion. The campaign intensified in 2009 after Swiss bank UBS admitted it helped U.S. taxpayers hide money abroad. The bank paid $780 million and turned over more than 4,000 names to U.S. authorities to avoid criminal charges.

More than 80 U.S. taxpayers have been criminally charged in connection with offshore accounts since the UBS settlement.

Recently, the U.S. reached an agreement with Switzerland that will allow dozens of Swiss banks to pay penalties and name names.  Next year a new law will take effect requiring foreign banks to report information about U.S. taxpayers to the Internal Revenue Service.

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