While Maddville and Dakota Wuss College go at it over who is lying about EB-5 (Mostly Rounds) I found an interesting twist on how Rounds ran EB-5 in this article;
Other press reports placed these fees — which are totally unregulated by the feds — at a flat, one-time payment of $30,000 to the regional center, and $15,000 to lawyers (who were probably related to the center.)
All of these fees, except the legal ones, would have gone to the state government had it not been for the contract with the Rounds administration
Let’s think about this conversion of a unit of a public university to a for-profit entity for a moment and discuss a hypothetical analogy:
Suppose the dean of the Engineering School at the hypothetical Maryland State Institute of Technology, discovered that some patents the school owned were about to become very valuable. Do you suppose the dean could persuade the president of MSIT to spin off the engineering school (including the patents) to the dean’s personal ownership, for a nominal return? That sound’s pretty unlikely, but that is exactly what happened in South Dakota at Northern State University.
I am puzzled as to why the facts outlined above — none of them secret — have not exploded into a major scandal in South Dakota. Here’s a situation in which one might well talk about self-dealing, conflicts of interest, depriving the state government of millions in revenues, the fiduciary responsibilities of state officials (such as Bollen), and the like.
I suggest you read the entire article. It is intriguing because what this blogger does is point out what is ‘scandalous’ about EB-5 that has already being reported to us, and fairly obvious to those who have been following the mess, and how the media isn’t effectively relaying that message to voters and constituents.
As the article points out, why hasn’t this exploded into a major scandal? Our apologetic, underpaid, advertorial media is mostly to blame.