Mayor Bloomberg Adds More Properties to His Collection

The city’s billionaire mayor has added another two properties to a collection that now includes more plots of land than

Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Photo: D Dipasupil/Getty Images)
Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Photo: D Dipasupil/Getty Images)

The city’s billionaire mayor has added another two properties to a collection that now includes more plots of land than the number of shoes in most people’s closets.

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The mayor purchased two new properties in Southampton, New York, according to highly-redacted tax returns and other disclosure forms released by his office this afternoon.

The first, a 4.8-acre property, is adjacent to a home he already owns in the town, and is characterized in the forms as “vacant unimproved land” valued at $500,000 or more. It was purchased in May 2012.

A second new property, also in Southampton, was purchased in July 2012. That residence is also valued at $500,000 or more on the forms.

Instead of precise dollar amounts, the forms, which reporters were invited to examine at his accountant’s office, include vague letter representations of actual amounts. (A for $1,000 to less than $5,000, B for $5,000 to less than $44,000, G for $500,000-plus.) Needless to say, the forms contained a lot of G’s.

In total, the mayor now owns 13 properties across the globe, including his personal townhouse on the Upper East Side, the vacant lot, and the Upper East Side building that houses his personal foundation, as well as homes in Armonk and North Salem, New York, Vail, Colorado, Wellington, Florida and international properties–St. George’s in Bermuda and London, UK.

The new forms also reveal for the first time that the mayor has several foreign bank accounts, with more than $500,000 stored in HSBC accounts in London, Paris and Hong Kong. He has between $6,000 and less than $100,000 in an account in Bermuda, where he often spends weekends. He also paid more than $500,000 a year to his household staff in 2012, the forms show.

The mayor also got a teeny boost from MSG Holdings, the owner of Madison Square Gardens. The company was forced to pay him less than $1,000 in interest on his season tickets to the Knicks and the Rangers after both teams canceled games because of their league’s respective lockouts. And he got between $1,000 and $4,999.99 in interest from the IRS, which was evidently late on an owed refund.

There were few other changes from previous years. The mayor continued to cash in on his minor celebrity, making between $1,000 and $4,999.99 for appearances on Law & Order and in the film The Adjustment Bureau, which starred Matt Damon. And he got less than $1,000 in residuals from an old appearance in the Muppets movie back in 2008.

The mayor, who contributed $370 million to charity last year, to causes ranging from anti-smoking initiatives to contests for government innovation, has an effective tax rate of 34.69 percent before charitable contributions, according to his office. They refuse to release the post-deductions amount, arguing that it would give competitors unfair insight into his company Bloomberg LP’s finances.

“You would be able to work backwards and make determinations about the company’s earnings,” his spokesman Marc LaVorgna said.

Update (4:23): This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the mayor actually purchased two new properties–not one–as the mayor’s office had originally told us. Given the size of the mayor’s property portfolio, the mistake is understandable.

Mayor Bloomberg Adds More Properties to His Collection