Charlotte.com- An academic credited with being an early critic of U.S. tax breaks enjoyed by private-equity firms and hedge funds has set his sights on a new target: investment funds run by foreign governments.
Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said in an online posting this week that tax exemptions benefiting sovereign wealth funds — large pools of capital controlled by governments across Asia and the Middle East — may deserve a closer look by Congress.
Fleischer was among the first researchers to highlight the ways that partnerships such as private-equity firms and hedge funds pay substantially lower tax rates than corporations. Legislation was introduced in Congress last year that would have changed those rules, but it stalled in the face of heavy lobbying by private equity groups.
