McMahon's company in line for federal tax breaks
Don Michak
Manchester Journal Inquirer
February 1, 2010
 
World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., the company controlled by Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Linda McMahon and her husband, expects to benefit from changes in federal tax law inserted into the government's massive bank bailout program by the Democrat she sought to unseat, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, a company spokesman acknowledged.
 
McMahon, who has taken a hard line against government bailouts and made much of her experience of building a company "without the help of big government," was pilloried by her opponents after the Journal Inquirer reported in October that the company had been handed nearly $3 million in state tax credits....
 
State records later released to Journal Inquirer showed that WWE actually was in line to receive $7 million more of the tax credits, and the company's spokesman, Robert Zimmerman, said WWE would apply for more of the incentives based on its production costs in Connecticut over the last year.
 
Zimmerman, moreover, last week confirmed that WWE also plans to benefit from an amendment Dodd - the chairman of the Senate banking committee - attached in October 2008 to a tax extension bill that was folded into the federal government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The substitute amendment was approved in a 74 to 25 vote, with both Dodd and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a longtime Democrat last re-elected as an independent candidate, voting "yea."...

The Dodd amendment specifically extended the deduction to film and television producers who shoot in the U.S. and permitted them to immediately deduct all production costs up to $15 million if 75 percent of the total compensation is for services performed in the country. The Los Angeles Times reported that the measure would result in tax breaks worth more than $470 million over the next decade....
 
Zimmerman initially dismissed questions about how WWE might benefit from the controversial government bailout, saying its state film credits had nothing do with TARP and suggesting that McMahon's political opponents were attempting to stoke a bogus news story.

But the spokesman later said that after checking with the company's accountants he had learned that the company could benefit from the tax breaks Dodd had inserted in the bailout package.

McMahon and her husband, Vincent K. McMahon, control 88 percent of the voting power of the issues and outstanding shares of WWE common stock, the company reported last year to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission...
 
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