Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 at 9:27PM :
In Reply to: Re: Looks dangerous posted by OTM Mike Stone (Idaho, USA) on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 at 5:06PM :
Yep. The thing to do is have a sharp lawyer set up a shell company with untraceable offshore ownership to buy the yard, then take all the useable vehicles off it. Few will have titles so it will be easy to hide where they came from. When you've highgraded the good stuff off out of the lot, just close up the shell company and disappear. According to the sale info, the land is leased anyway, so the landowner will be stuck with removing the residue and dealing with the hazmat cleanup. If the EPA/DEQ comes after anybody besides the landowner, it'll be the previous operators of the junkyard, since they'll be the only ones they can legally connect to it. At that point the landowner will probably abandon it, and the county will take it for back taxes. Then they can use millions of dollars of taxpayer money to clean up every last teaspoonful of oily dirt. When it's all cleaned up to the point where you could eat the dirt without getting sick, some developer friend of a councilman will get it for next to nothing in a "public-private partnership", with the county promising to absorb all future environmental risks, and he'll build a housing development or a strip mall on it.
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