A distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute has unleashed his criticism of the government’s Paycheck Protection Program for bailing out billionaire George Soros’ East-West Management Institute, with payments totaling nearly half a million dollars.
That’s while the organization’s federal grants and contracts, its primary source of income, were rising from $9 million in Fiscal Year 2019 to nearly $15 million in 2020.
The comments come from Chris Farrell, in an article at Gatestone.
He noted that in March the Small Business Administration gave a $234,548 “loan” to EWMI. He reported that followed a $226,179 PPP “loan” a year earlier.
“The official description of the transaction is ‘to aid small businesses in maintaining workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic,’ but federal grants and contracts to EWMI (its primary source of revenue) rose from $9,185,194 in FY 2019 to $14,859,293 in 2020,” he explained.
“As a supposedly small business struggling through the pandemic, EWMI enjoys office space at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City and 1101 Connecticut Ave NW in Washington, D.C.,” he explained.
Farrell, also an executive with Judicial Watch, noted his organization published a report in 2018 that documented how EWMI “manages projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
“For those interested, EWMI maintains a web page with documentation concerning their non-profit status and their financial statements. You can also view their self-described ‘Donors and Partners’ who, evidently, were not able or willing to ‘loan’ money to EWMI for paycheck protection. The list of donors and partners is quite remarkable — from the World Bank to Romania’s Justice Ministry, among many others. It makes one wonder why American taxpayers had to cover the PPP ‘loan.’ It reminds one of Senator William Proxmire’s (D-WI) ‘Golden Fleece Award’ for squandering the American public’s money,” Farrell explained.
He continued, “We need to ask ourselves how ‘the system’ – our government – facilitates this sort of racket without checks or oversight. Harvard University can be publicly shamed into returning COVID relief money, but a Soros group gets a pass? Why the disparity of treatment and accountability?
“Think about it: a Soros-backed operation that manages a big chunk of the State Department’s international development operations, pretending it is like any other American ‘small business,’ was seeking paycheck protection subsidies because of COVID. It is an insult. It is grotesque,” he wrote. “They get away with it because political operators on the Left are, it seems, creatures of big government. They are comfortable operating in that environment and in the organs of the state. They know how to work the various systems, get into the programs, make the paperwork fly and direct the taxpayer subsidies.”
But he pointed out that the Wall Street Journal in 2017 documented that Soros moved $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations, which includes EWMI.
“Why are American taxpayers subsidizing any part of his operations?” Farrell asked.
The online Britannica reports the billionaire Soros’ “status as an almost mythical financier was established in September 1992 when the British government devalued the pound sterling.”
The report said, “Through his Quantum group of companies, Soros had sold billions of pounds during the days preceding devaluation, much of it purchased with borrowed money. Afterward Soros bought back pounds, repaid the money he had borrowed, and made a profit of about $1 billion.”
At the time, he was given the moniker, “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
The report said Soros’ name also was linked to a financial crisis that swept across Asia in 1998, and in December 2002 a French court convicted Soros of insider trading for a 1988 stock deal involving financial services company Société Générale, and he was fined.
He’s reported to have given billions of dollars to far-left causes and organizations, such as the Open Society Foundations.
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