A note on the Watchtowers property investments

Saintbertholdt

Hello there,

About a year ago there was a thread regarding the 2008 Watchtower Bible and tract Society of New Yorks tax return.

http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/287098/2008-watchtower-income-tax-return?page=1

A reference was made to the Provictor Property Fund IV which was listed as their primary alternate business activity.

Turns out that at that time 75% of the Chrysler Building was owned by the Provictor Property fund IV until it was sold during that year.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/09/news/international/chrysler_building/?postversion=2008070913

Just thought you should know :)

As I said in the original thread, this appears to be a real estate investment trust, of which the WTBS owned some fraction. It looks to me (I'll take a longer look later today when I have more time) like they sold that investment and made about $17,000.

Vidiot

Hmph.

If it was in the Chrysler building, and they only got $17K, what did they own?

A broom closet?

JeffT

They owned a piece of the investment trust that owned 75% of the building.

What the trust does is collect a bunch of money from a number of investors, and use that to buy the property. In this arrangement, you don't have a bank mortgage, the money that would go to the bank gets paid to the trust, and distributed to the investors. They can be good investments, a lot of what they pay out is tax sheltered income.

I used to do a lot of accounting for real estate investment operations, although not necessarily REIT's.

millie210

I just read over on JWArchive that they own a 7% investment with JPMorgan.

Can anyone really know all the places they have stuffed money?

JeffT

Can anyone really know all the places they have stuffed money?

Presumably their accountants, although if somebody is really crooked, they may have off shore or personal accounts event the CPA's don't know about. For that matter, non-profits are often easy targets for fraud because nobody knows how to keep proper eyes on the accountants.

millie210

Here is the comment where that statement is made on JWArchive. Its on page 8.

Not that the page number helps because as people load their pictures the page number will change.

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania owns over 7% of J.P. Morgan Chase Liquid Assets Money Market Fund.

Here is a page by JP Morgan Chase about how much $ is in that mutual fund. Take 7.3% of that total and we are one VERY RICH religion. ;-) Jehovah has blessed us.

I just did the math and as of today that total is equal to $1,361,584,818.41 give or take a few pennies. Wow! Jehovah is smiling.

Thank you for your contributions!

Agape!

The Librarian

p.s - This doesn’t even included all of these other subsidiary corporations of WTBTSP

- See more at: http://www.jw-archive.org/#sthash.NUmdAygl.dpuf

OrphanCrow

Millie: I just did the math and as of today that total is equal to $1,361,584,818.41 give or take a few pennies.

Millie...can you show your math? I am not following how you got that figure. The only relevant number I could find was that the fund was worth $18.78 billion...and if the WTS owns 7%, then the WTS share would be worth just over $13 million.

https://www.jpmorganfunds.com/cm/Satellite?UserFriendlyURL=holdings&pagename=jpmfVanityWrapper&cusip=4812C0324

Portfolio stats (as of 8/31/2015)

Fund Assets	$18.78
(in billions)

JeffT

I agree with Millie's computation (18,000,000,000 X 7%= about a billion and a quarter). When I went into the Borg in 1973 they were selling almost fifty million magazines a month for a quarter each (which they got even if the mags ended up in the back of the publishers closet). Given that costs were next to nothing, that means a LOT of money going somewhere. I'm not surprised that they would have a billion plus tucked away.

OrphanCrow

Thanks, Jeff.

Got it.

A note on the Watchtowers property investments

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