spinynorman Posted September 15, 2003 Report Share Posted September 15, 2003 The PCLinuxOnline daily summary has a story about a venture capital company investing in Microsoft, SCO and Drugstore.com (director: Melinda French Gates)... I don't follow it all, as I'm a simple public sector worker :) but it looks fishy to me. Perhaps someone with financial/business background can tell us what it means? :? http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?n...c=2104&forum=46 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 15, 2003 Report Share Posted September 15, 2003 It's basically a shell game to disguise the identity of the principals involved. Corporations have a lot of reporting requirements which will allow you discover the identity of the officers, major shareholders, etc so you can find out who is running things. Partnerships generally do not. If two people want to conceal their ownership in a business then each of them can form a corporation where each owns 100% of their own corporation. The two corporations can then form a partnership to run the business. It provides a layer of insulation concealing their two identities. There's no public record of who the partners are so if your not doing business with the partnership, finding any info will be very difficult. Rinse and repeat several times and you can create a real labyrinth which makes it almost impossible to find the real people controling things. That's essentially what has happened here. I didn't read through it all but it appears that Gates has an undisclosed interest in a company that has been purchasing SCO stock and that entity currently owns 5% of SCO's outstanding stock. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted September 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted September 15, 2003 Thanks, pmpatrick, for that clear explanation. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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