The top 1 percent are evading $163 billion a year in taxes, the Treasury finds.
Cascade Investment, the firm that manages the fortune of Bill Gates, is buying half of Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s stake in Four Seasons for $2.2 billion — making Mr. Gates the majority owner of the luxury hotel chain.
The deal, which was announced on Wednesday morning by Cascade and Kingdom Holding, the prince’s investment firm in Riyadh, will increase Mr. Gates’s stake in Four Seasons to about 71 percent, from a little less than 50 percent.
The transaction comes on the heels of Mr. Gates’s divorce last month from Melinda French Gates, the Microsoft founder’s wife of nearly three decades. Few details of their division of cash and assets as part of the divorce are known. But Cascade continues to manage the money and investments Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates held during their marriage, as well as the endowment of the Gates Foundation, the charity they co-founded in 2000.
Cascade first teamed up with Kingdom to buy a position in the Four Seasons in 2007, when each acquired a 47.5 percent stake in the hotel chain for a total price of $3.8 billion. The remaining 5 percent is held by Isadore Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons.
In 2019, before the pandemic hit, Cascade and Kingdom had discussed the idea of taking Four Seasons public. More recently, the two companies also discussed the idea of selling down one or both of their stakes, two people familiar with the matter said in May, but ultimately, Cascade chose to stay put.
The hospitality sector has been hard hit by the pandemic. Despite an increase in leisure travel after vaccinations became widely available earlier this year, a survey in mid-August commissioned by the American Hotel Lodging Association indicated that amid a resurgence in cases in the United States, 42 percent of the 2,200 respondents were canceling upcoming travel plans, with no intention to reschedule.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/09/08/business/economy-stock-market-news/