Safe Harbor Ep 3: How Quellos Got Caught
"as phony as a three-dollar bill"
In 1982, Selim Zilkha paid $28 million for a bankrupt oil company in Ohio. He made his son an executive. Sixteen years later, Michael Zilkha sold his shares for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The younger Zilkha had studied French literature at Oxford and co-founded a punk record label in New York. By 2000, he had produced a film and was building a wind energy company.
To manage the tax bill, Zilkha turned to Quellos, a Seattle-based money manager.
For the past two weeks, I’ve told the stories of businessmen drawn to Quellos.
None of them could have known that Quellos’ tax shelter, called POINT (Personally Optimized INvestment Transaction), was a sham.
