Posted by Patrick Henry on March 02, 1998 at 18:42:38:
In Reply to: Re: State Sales Tax/Two Cities posted by B. Morris on March 02, 1998 at 13:33:31:
In my opinion, none of that is relevant. You are
being prosecuted upon the same terms as an officer
of a corporation. When corporate activities constitute
a violation of a criminal statute, the corporation
cannot go to jail, so some corporate officer is the
scapegoat.
In you case, if the trust was doing something illegal,
they should have gone after the trustee, since he is
in ALL RESPECTS, both the legal and equitable owner
of the trust corpus. If anyone "working" in behalf of
the trust (such as managing director, or whatever),
takes actions not authorized by the trustee, and those
actions are criminal, then it would follow that those
individuals would be criminally prosecuted rather than
the trustee.
It would appear to me that the state is operating on
the presumtpion that no valid pure trust exists, that
the legal entity described by the indenture/contract
is nothing more than your alter ego, and thus, there
was no need to name the trust in the complaint.
This is certainly a rebuttable presumption, and one
that should be hammered on from the get-go.
Just as a "by-the-way" -- if the pure trust is
engaged in commerce, then it is not unreasonable to
expect that the state, or some subdivision thereof,
may successfully require that "juristic entity" to
obtain "licenses" and collect "fees" for it. Yes,
I know that the pure trust is NOT a statutory entity,
but totally excluding it from statutory obligations
when engaged in commerce is an uphill battle at best.