The greed and leverage boys hate paying taxes. Billionaire private equity underwriters (PEU) have relied on a compliant Congress to keep their preferred "carried interest taxation" in direct opposition to longstanding public will. In the midst of this milieu Vista Equity Partners is buying Avalara, a tax compliance software company.
Avalara's website states its software covers "various transaction taxes, including sales and use, VAT, GST, excise, communications, lodging, and other indirect tax types."
The company stated it will "not host an earnings conference call or provide financial guidance in conjunction with this earnings release. We also will not participate in previously scheduled conferences including the Canaccord Genuity Growth Conference and the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference."
Vista Equity will pay 8.8 times Avalara's estimated revenue for the next twelve months. Avalara currently has less than $1 billion in debt via senior notes. Vista will borrow at least $2.5 billion to fund the deal. Much of that is from fellow private equity underwriters, Blue Owl Capital and Apollo.
PEU boys are happy to pay interest on debt. They cannot stand giving Uncle Sam his fair share in taxes. Vista Equity Partners founder Robert Smith is such an example.
Robert Smith, the billionaire chief executive of private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, played a larger role than previously known in the $2 billion alleged tax evasion of his former business partner, recently filed court documents show.
Mr. Smith played a key role in a 2004 deal nicknamed “Project Hotrod” that was designed to allow Texas billionaire Robert Brockman to avoid U.S. taxes while transferring $635 million from his main U.S. holding company into his offshore entities, according to internal memos and other deal documents filed by the Internal Revenue Service in U.S. District Court in Houston as part of a civil dispute with Mr. Brockman.
The IRS, calling the Brockman offshore entities involved “shams,” claims in the court filings that most of the transferred funds were dividends on which Mr. Brockman should have paid taxes.
Mr. Smith isn’t a party to the court dispute, but the documents show that he was involved in the planning of the transaction and that a Cayman Islands entity named Vista Equity Fund III LP facilitated the transaction. He personally signed the deal-closing documents on behalf of that entity, the documents show.These are the "little" people Senator Kyrsten Sinema wants to help. Nurseries and car washes don't have billions to put on both sides of an $8.4 billion deal. Tax dodgers do.
