On Shame (Or Lack Thereof)

trademark dave clued me into this:

Larry Ellison, ranked 12th on the Forbes 500 list with a net worth of $25 billion, has bagged a $3 million tax break after arguing that his flamboyant Japanese-style estate in Woodside is functionally obsolete.

The chief executive officer of software giant Oracle Corp. will be paid from San Mateo County property taxes collected this year, which otherwise would have gone to schools, the county general fund and cities, among other things, Deputy Controller Kanchan Charan said. The hit to schools alone will be nearly $1.4 million.

Ellison's Octopus Holdings LP acquired the 23-acre site in May 1995 for $12 million and spent nine years constructing the lavish property, modeled on a Japanese emperor's 16th century country residence, according to the San Mateo assessment appeals board.

It consists of a nearly 8,000-square-foot main house with two wings, a guest home, three cottages and a gymnasium as well as a 5-acre man-made lake, two waterfalls and two bridges. Hundreds of mature cherry, maple and other trees were planted among nearly 1,000 redwoods, pines and oaks.

The assessor's office based its January 2005 valuation on so-called reproduction costs, the $166.3 million it should have cost to build, said Terry Flinn, deputy assessor-county clerk-recorder. Ultimately, after multiple delays and construction change orders, it ran more than $200 million.

Octopus Holdings, represented by San Francisco attorney William Bennett, asserted that it was worth only $64.7 million at that time, and in the two tax years since.

Why? How did Larry Ellison's palatial estate decline by more than 60 percent in value in a market where luxury homes are actually appreciating and single-family homes values in the county only decreased 6.3 percent in the last year, according to DataQuick Information Systems. Read all about it.

Read all about it.

And what does the municipality denied this revenue have to say about this?

Woodside will lose about $78,000 from the $130,000 in property taxes it collected on the Mountain Home Road property during the past few years, Town Manager Susan George said. Nevertheless, she doesn't begrudge Ellison.

"He went through a process that was laid out by the law," she said. "It shouldn't make any difference how much money he has if the process was fair."

That said, she added: "We'll miss the money; we always have good things we can do with it."

In other words, "Thank you, Sir! May I have another?"

By the way, Mr. Ellison's total 2007 compensation was $61,180,524 (that's sixty-one million one hundred eighty thousand five hundred twenty-four Dollars U.S., or $167,618 per day people). (h/t ProfWombat)