MOSCOW MITCH WILL RESIGN
Mitch McConnell’s Freighted Ties to a Shadowy Shipping Company
After drugs were found aboard the Ping May, a vessel owned by his wife’s family’s company, Colombian authorities are investigating.
Family’s Shipping Company Could Pose Problems for Trump’s Transportation Pick
President-elect Donald Trump has named Elaine L. Chao to head the U.S. Department of Transportation, overseeing the nation’s vast network of highways, railroads and airports. The job also means leading the Maritime Administration, which supervises the shipping industry and has as one of its primary missions to advocate for American-owned ships to fly the U.S. flag. That could pose a conflict for Chao, whose family owns a shipping business that, while headquartered in New York, operates 17 ships flagged in Liberia and Hong Kong. The ships are owned by subsidiaries of the main business, now called Foremost Group, and most of the subsidiaries are registered in the Marshall Islands, a secretive jurisdiction where companies disclose little about their finances or officers.b Elaine Chao’s family owns ships flagged abroad, a way to avoid U.S. taxes and higher labor costs. But one of Chao’s missions at the Transportation Department will be to press American-owned ships to fly the U.S. flag.
Financial disclosure statements filed by Chao when she was George W. Bush’s secretary of labor from 2001 to 2009 declare no interest in the company, nor do disclosure statements filed by her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.
https://www.propublica.org/article/familys-shipping-company-could-pose-problems-for-trumps-transportation-pick