Ossoff has reported increasing assets in the company even as its financial reports suggest the company itself may not be faring well at all.
In 2013, Jon Ossoff became CEO of the film company Insight TWI, which he describes as producing documentaries to expose global government corruption and conflict and which, at last filing, is headquartered in the United Kingdom. Ossoff, a Democrat currently running for a Georgia Senate seat against Republican senator David Perdue, has become progressively more involved in the company since he first bought a stake in it.
When Ossoff ran for public office in 2017 — a failed campaign against Republican Karen Handel to fill the House seat in Georgia’s sixth congressional district — he was a 50 percent stakeholder in TWI. For the first quarter of 2017, he reported having between $250,001 and $500,000 invested in the company.
By spring of 2019, Ossoff’s share of the company and voting rights had increased to 75 percent. And here’s where things get a bit murky: Though Ossoff reported owning between $1 million and $5 million in TWI assets for 2019, the company’s most recent annual financial statement, filed in the U.K. for 2018, disclosed total company assets of about $557,000. The company did not file any disclosures in 2019.
Meanwhile, as Ossoff gestures at the company as evidence of his small-business acumen and opposition to corruption, that same 2018 U.K. financial disclosure form from the company showed a total equity of -$292,819. Assets include everything owned by the company, while its equity is the company’s assets minus everything that it owes.
The Ossoff campaign, however, vehemently rejects the notion that there is any discrepancy in these numbers. A spokesperson called the premise in this post “completely wrong” and described these as “two completely different numbers,” saying that Ossoff’s reported stake reflected the company’s fair-market value. Spokesperson Miryam Lipper said in a statement:
The value of the company is more than the assets and debt listed on its balance sheet, the value of the company is between $1 million and $5 million, which is the fair market value of Jon’s stake in the business that Jon reports on his personal financial disclosure. The balance sheet filing lists only assets, not the company’s valuation. Additionally, this filing reports investment from owners as debt, and any mischaracterization of that is wrong: small business owners routinely invest money into their companies, and Insight TWI is a healthy, 30-year-old organization with a sterling reputation, ongoing international businesses, and no significant third-party debt.
The campaign, which also described this comparison as “absurd,” did not return a request for comment prior to publication. They issued this statement after the post was first published.
The Democratic candidate hasn’t disclosed — and by all accounts has yet to have been asked — whether his company pays any U.S. taxes and whether any part of the company has relocated to Georgia.
Just a few months ago, Ossoff attempted to quietly disclose that he had received payments from a Hong Kong media company that opposes pro-democracy efforts there and supports the Chinese Communist Party. His report also indicated that Ossoff had been paid the Qatari-backed news group Al Jazeera. Late last month, Ossoff’s campaign claimed that he failed to disclose those connections earlier due to “a paperwork oversight.”
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include a statement from Ossoff’s campaign, provided to National Review after publication.