If nothing illegal is going on, are you not always giving more than what you get in tax credit, always loosing and never making money by giving to charity ?
As opposed to losing a large chunk of that money to taxes, or having to deal with heavy taxes on whatever you decide to do with it (capital gains, gift to family, etc.) and then whatever's left when you die being taxed heavily in the estate transfer.
"Make money" was poor phrasing on my part. "Mitigate your losses" is a better way to put it. Charitable giving allows the mega-wealthy to lose less money, while gaining recognition and influence, and supporting whatever it is that they care about.
Trying to sneak a kickback into the process is just incredibly dumb, especially when the gift is being made to a public agency which WILL be audited. Yashin's only real defense in that situation was that he was flat-out ignorant and just going along with what this "independent fundraiser" was telling him to do. The independent fundraiser frankly should probably have gone to jail, considering the cut he took for setting up a blatantly illegal deal.
edit: Found another article with more detail on how this mess came to pass.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/yashin-cancels-1-million-nac-gift/
Chairwoman Jean Riley maintained the arts centre's board of directors had not been aware of the side deals. Those extra twists were negotiated by its former director, John Cripton, who is currently locked in a bitter war of words with the NAC after resigning last October in a disagreement over budgets. Kim McCuaig, the NAC's former marketing director, was apparently the only other executive privy to the deal - and he was fired in December. Only after Elaine Calder, Cripton's replacement, became aware of the NAC's obligations was the board informed. Calder says when she asked McCuaig about the arrangement, he told her the Yashin money flow would stop if the NAC did not comply. Calder says she was then contacted in December by Mark Gandler, Yashin's New York City-based agent, who asked her to help draft an invoice for $85,000 - though no services had been provided or requested.
Remarkably, even those burned by the scandal tried to spare Yashin from blame. The NAC's Riley suggested the player "had little understanding of the arrangement," and expressed "genuine sorrow for an extremely capable young man." Promoter Reid, lamenting what the soured deal would do to his image, told Maclean's: "Yashin wasn't even at the table during the talks. Hockey agents often make deals that have bonuses for the parents of players, and you definitely can't blame an agent for getting the most he can."
So again, the real defense for Yashin lies simply in the possibility that this malarkey was all arranged without his knowledge, and being a hockey player rather than a nonprofit consultant he simply went along with what he thought was a legitimate deal.
Another edit:
Google is my friend. Apparently Pat Reid, who was cast as a "nonprofit consultant" in this scheme, is in fact a sports promoter who had absolutely no business acting as the agent for a deal of this nature.
Here's an article about how Reid went on to scam other public entities in the sports/hockey world, including more misrepresentations of his qualifications and job titles. He's now the executive director of the commission that oversees fighting sports in Edmonton (after scamming his way into that position) and
as of very recently it appears he may have been directly responsible for the death of a participant due to his lack of attention to rule enforcement.
Selections of the book "Art and Politics: The History of the National Arts Centre" are available online. Enough is viewable to establish that Cripton's reputation rested very heavily on his ability to find "innovative" income streams for the NAC, and that he was very much a promotional thinker. It's also quite clear that NAC staff had no clue what they were doing in setting up the Yashin gift (it mentions they weren't sure how to provide the tax receipt) and that even the signing of documents was bungled. There was no final copy on file, no indication that anyone had witnessed the signing, not even a signature from the Yashins on the copies that were able to be found. Tellingly, the arrangement we have been discussing all along was different than Reid's vision which would have had Yashin's mother acting as a
salaried director of the NAC.
Kim McCuaig, the NAC marketing director, was apparently the director of development at Carleton prior to taking the NAC job. He is still listed on LinkedIn as a "fundraising consultant". Virtually nothing else exists about him online which is dated any later than the Yashin affair, so it's hard to say exactly what his story is. That said, there is really no excuse for anyone who has acted as a nonprofit development officer to fall into a situation like this one. It's also extremely concerning that someone who has the job title of "marketing director" would be coordinating charitable gifts in the first place... that leads to precisely the sort of thing that happened with Yashin, where McCuaig evidently had his eye on a promotional bonanza at the cost of making sure that the deal was actually legal. The end result was a high-profile disaster for the institution and probably the reason that he apparently has not done anything similar since.
In the final analysis, I believe the root issue was a known confidence man (Reid) who had no business acting as a charitable advisor, taking advantage of a young wealthy man (Yashin) and an agent who apparently had no idea how any of this worked (Mark Gandler) to set up a poorly-conceived deal with an agency led by a director who probably didn't know any better (Cripton) because he was being advised by a marketing director who fancied himself a fundraiser but didn't have industry-standard competence in that area (McCuaig). The result of all this being that Yashin, who had the least financial expertise out of any of these people, found himself and his parents embroiled in a potential criminal activity involving a foreign government.
In THAT respect, yes, it seems that Yashin got the shaft here.
"Old Gretzky" was the NHL leader in assists in two of his last three seasons and the rags' top scorer his last season. It's laughable that you think any GM in his right mind would compare Gretzky at his oldest with Yashin at his, er, "best".
