LDS Church and investment firm agree to pay $5M for going to ‘great lengths’ to hide its stock holdings

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BREAKING: The LDS Church and its investment firm Ensign Peak have agreed to pay $5 million for going to 'great lengths' to hide its stock holdings.

Within days of new stories revealing that theEnsign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the parties announced a settlement Tuesday.

The SEC charged the Salt Lake City investment firm with “failing to file forms that would have disclosed the church’s equity investments,” according to an agency, “and for instead filing forms for shell companies that obscured the church’s portfolio and misstated Ensign Peak’s control over the church’s investment decisions.” The SEC also charged the church with “causing these violations.”

“We affirm our commitment to comply with the law,” it said, “regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed.” Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said the church’s investment manager, “with the church’s knowledge,” went to “great lengths” to avoid disclosing the church’s investments.the release

 

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$5M out of $100,000,000,000.00 chicken feed… they will get that back in one month.

We need to see is the entire 32 billion from the shysters!

They should have just embraced more transparency from the beginning.

5M is a joke. Take it all.

Fake news

Yeah, I’m wanting to get my tithings back!!! Screw them and their cult! I was once one, so I have legitimately made that comment!

That fine should have been a lot more than $5 million - they hid $32 BILLION. They should be forced to pay what would have been the tax on the whole thing. We need to remove tax exemption for all churches.

Churches shouldn’t have stock holdings, they need to be taxed

This only motivates me to increase my income so my increased tithes will help replace what the government extracted.

They hid 35 billion and get fined 5 million. For those unaware they got fined 0.0142857143% of what they tried hiding from the government and lied about to its church followers who donated that money to help those in need. Lesson learned?

Should be $5 billion. The church is worth at least 10 times that. $5M is chump change. What happens next They should lose their tax exempt status over this.

How about they use the money on some therapy for all the childhoods they ruin🤷‍♀️ just a thought

LeyendasPodcast ElBadiablo

Riddle me this.... If 'Corporations are people too my friend' (Mitt Romney)... Why is no one going to prison?

No surprise... LOL Mormons...

A church having stock? Why and this is why I keep away from my church anymore.

It’s a mere pittance that the Corp. of the Church won’t even miss.(They were hoping for a fine and not further criminal delving.)Doug Andersen and chums consider the matter “closed” and want this shady embarrassment to go away quickly. Oz got caught.

Gee, why would they want to hide it? How have people been reacting the past several years of learning about said investments...?

It should have been a bigger penalty, $5 million is a drop in the $100 billion bucket.

Are you F*ing kidding?! The LDS Ponzi Scheme generates over 2 Million a day in interest alone, over a billion annually from members & they get a simple slap on the wrist! They knew what they were doing! Ch_JesusChrist this is fraud! JimIrsay WhiteHouse

I could give two craps if an investment firm, LDS or not, goes to great lengths to keep the corrupt Feds away from their money. Only haters think this is news.

The Mormon church has always been a business enterprise masquerading as a religion.

What a dam joke . How do you all like your dam tithing money going towards bailouts for the church. Give me a break this is bs!

Ten percent would have been better.

Almost like it’s a corporation

Chump change

HODLpersona

Everyone likes money 💰 but some like it alot. utah

And all that $100,000,000,000.00 for lobbying paid off. Only a $5 milli fine! God bless America. 🇺🇸 🫡

They hid $32 BILLION dollars & they get fined $5 million. What. A. Joke.

LDS shouldn't even qualify as a church, and we should tax all churches regardless.

That is it? $5 million?

The fastest $5 million ever spent. 😂

The Savior went to great lengths to hide his stock holdings

Yeah, everyone. Great idea! Let’s tax the church and give it to the Federal Government….because we know the government is such a good money manager. Get real!

Peanuts

Are you honest in your dealings with ….?

So, basically, they can't buy the really expensive lunch for like a day. Hell, I bet most of the people being punished have $5 million just sitting in their wallet collecting dust. What a joke. Tax the Churches.

Is this a typo? Surely this should be billion with a “b”

That’s a lot of widows’ mites

Based upon the interest on the Ensign Peak money, this fine took 7 hours and 20 minutes for the church to recover.

Maybe the second coming is the SEC. 🤷‍♀️

They hid the money because then they couldn’t extort their members for the 10% if others found out they were loaded. Remember you aren’t going to heaven if you don’t give the church 10%, which is complete BS. And they will hunt you down if you move. They want their money.

13 straight quarters of no issues. It’s been fixed…

Aukland, NZ Assuming it’s another monster sized temple

All Christian churches tithe. The bigger, the more tithes. That means surplus post-spending on operations/donations (welfare, foreign aid) The prudent and biblical thing to do with surplus is invest it so as to maximize future expenditures rather than blow the surplus in one go.

Article of Faith 13: We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men... Yeah hiding billion surely is honest. 🙄

Article of Faith 12: We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.

Pocket change. They should lose their tax exempt status.

Love it! This is not an admission of guilt. It is merely a fee to get the government off the Church's back. It gives the government the ability to show that it's efforts weren't entirely for nothing--even though it found nothing of any significance.

BjaminWood Not even a slap on the wrist. More like a light tap.

That’ll show them…. Nothing lol

There's no way that $5 Million would have helped anyone homeless or otherwise in need of Christ-like mercy. It was much better spent on secrecy.

LDS church as corrupt as the rest of them. LDS members act high and mighty but they just as guilty.

How about a real audit and real penalties

Religions are just one big grift. All of them were made up to cheat, steal from and control the common man.

Crooks. Patriarchal goons. And a lot, not all, of bigots.

It may be the Lord's church and its true because of the Priesthood authority. But its still run by man. You can't convince me otherwise. This is why ypu need the holy ghost people are going to use the church for personal gain. You have to be able to differentiate.

Really you say

This cult needs to be eradicated and shouldn't be influencing congress in Utah whatsoever. WTF happened to separation of Church and State?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 'A slap on the wrist.'

😂😂😂🫵 suckers

This is so misleading. Do better

I've known people on hospice, bedridden and literally dying and their Bishops come by personally to pick up their tithing. It's so sad. Can't buy your way into heaven...

Ch_JesusChrist do we get an apology now? It is really sad to see the pride cycle that the leaders keep pushing us into.

The Church did this for more than 20 years & was only fined $5 million. That's what I call a good return for their investment.

This winter homeless people froze to death because they didn’t have proper shelter. The church could certainly help these people. This is their community.

Okay now put all the pedos and rapists away for good

The LDS Church has UT media in its pocket. The advantage is clear when news emphasizes how the church gives to this cause or that, never noting the other faiths doing the same. Such bias & arrogance sickens me, as victory is claimed when generosity isn’t meant to be a contest.😒

Tip of the iceberg.

Ooooops. Sorry. Didn't mean to. Now go away. Shocking, I say!

Nice that the church had to send millions of tithing dollars to the government. That's not why i pay my tithing, and it's very frustrating to see the church being such poor stewards of money we all sacrifice to pay.

Basically admitting to the crimes! Where’s the accountability? How do members put up with their 🐂💩, and keep paying tithing at the same time? 🤯

Typical SLTribune anti-mormon propaganda. So the church did report the earnings. What does it matter if all together or in separate ones? Just like everyone else in this country including its citizens and companies. The less the gov track and know about you, the better! Go LDS!

Great lengths?

Tax churches.

Dammit! Couldn't you have gotten them to pay $5 million AND agree to hire janitors to clean the buildings? I thought you cared about the members donating funds! Ordain Janitors!

There should be two more zeroes on that 5 mil.

This isn't a fine, it isn't even a fee. This is a joke. $5 Million to hide $32 Billion for 20 years? How about seize the $32B as a start. Half of religion in America is a criminal enterprise. They should be treated as such.

idk man that doesn't seem like much of a penalty

I'm going to take the moral victory here, the church's admission of guilt and deciet. Even if the fine was 100B, the fact the church was caught in fruad is good enough for me.

Lying for the Lord

Is that like .005% of their holdings?

5 million, that’s nothing compared to their wealth.

Because 'God Wills It!'

The Mormons saw the Catholics being greedy and corrupt and said hold my Diet Coke.

The church issues the following statement: “We affirm our commitment to comply with the law, regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed.” I thought the church didn’t give apologies…

Not even CLOSE enough to an appropriate punishment.

They paid ransom to be left alone.

Tax the church 🙂

At their reported investments and interest rates, this fine will take a little over 6 hours to recoup.

realKellyKnight yeah your church has nothing to hide.

They do a lots of charitable work in poor countries. They have an excellent resource to help in disasters. You should go check it out.

Soooo a religious organization is doing something sneaky and wrong… no, say it isn’t so 🤦🏽

A $5m fine on holdings around 50,000 times that number is just... Fuck, what a weak-willed slap on the wrist.

Great use of “sacred” tithing funds. Paying government fines.

of course they use the cliche 'we regret mistakes made'

A $5 million dollar fine. 💸 Assuming Ensign Peak still only has $100B in assets and they continue to make the reported average of 7% in annual returns, they can expect to recoup the full value of this fine in only 6 hrs and 15 min.

Who gets it?

“Church authorities also have said the “rainy day” reserves were intended to help pay for operations in poorer parts of the world and to see the global faith through economic downturns.” I think we are in an economic downturn, what is the church doing to help its members?

“For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to the world.”

'Ensign Peak went through their couch cushions and said they're reawwy sowwy.'

JoeMyGod TAX CHURCHES

Opens the door for the IRS. Whistle-blowers about to get paid some serious coin.

Trash reporting trash news.

That’s peanuts compared to the wealth they are hoarding in Ensign Peak. We need to tax churches. There is absolutely no reason that self-declared religious leaders live high on the hog while hoarding wealth. They abuse the tax code.

Mormons are really trying to compete with Catholics for most money and corruption, Prophet is going to have to accept the church will always be number 2 for that😎

That is not enough, it's just more of the same. Church is just corrupt, sorry if I offend, there's plenty of good people call BS on that. For crying out loud. Homeless, crazy, suffering people in the streets, and they roll in filthy lucre

Fake news.

SLTribPolitics Meanwhile, Hunter Biden gets a pass. LDS people need to vote against the regime that targets them.

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