In addition to losing his plum White House communications director job after less than two weeks as a member of the Trump administration, Anthony Scaramucci’s lawyer confirmed Tuesday that he would forgo the capital gains tax deferral that could have come with it, CNN reported.
In January, perhaps in preparation of an expected job at the White House, Scaramucci arranged to sell his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, to a Chinese conglomerate. As a government employee, he may have had the option of deferring the capital gains tax on that sale — an allowance meant to free government employees from conflicts of interest.
Now, firmly out of government, Scaramucci’s sale has yet to be completed. But when it is, his lawyer told CNN, he’ll pay the taxes he may have otherwise deferred.
“Mr. Scaramucci is going to pay the capital gains taxes once the sale goes through,” Scaramucci’s lawyer, Elliot Berke, told CNN. “There was never an attempt to game the system — it was simply to adhere to what is allowable by law. His true and only purpose was to serve the country. And he will be back.”
Scaramucci, a big-name fundraiser for Trump who took a risk to back a candidate shunned early on by Wall Street money, seemed destined for a variety of federal jobs before his brief stint in the press shop.
A month before being named communications director, Scaramucci was named chief strategy officer of the Export-Import Bank, though that role was similarly short-lived.
