See “conduit contribution”: "Here’s how a “conduit contribution” works. Person A wants to give a lot of money to Candidate X. But federal law puts a ceiling on how much one person can contribute to a candidate. To get around the law, Person A goes to Friend B or Employee C or Associate D and says, “Hey, if you give me the money for Candidate X, I’ll pass along your check and then reimburse you out of my own pocket or from corporate funds.” The friend, employee, or associate effectively becomes a “conduit” for the real contributor, thus the name."
"The law is clear: Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, making campaign contributions in the name of another person or otherwise concealing the true source of the funds is a felony if the contribution exceeds $2,000. In fact, both the person soliciting the contribution and the person who agrees to be reimbursed for it could be investigated. Even if neither is aware of the law."
Nowhere in these emails does it say that Sony is reimbursing the execs for their contributions. If anything, the reluctance of having to ask execs to contribute indicates that they are not doing that.
>>"What's the actual legal status on this? It definitely seems to circumvent the law - but is it clearly criminal?"
The email indicates that they were planning to structure their donations "by making this a focus of our individual giving from execs" ie: 'fundraising'.
>>"$50k is a heavy lift since most of it needs to come from individual contributions (only $5k can come from corp.), but I recommend we do it. Cuomo has been a strong protector of the film incentive – even amidst recent criticisms of the program. Also, given the shows we’ve got there and your relationships I think it would look a bit odd if you weren’t on the host committee."
>>"I think we can get to the 50k commitment by making this a focus of our individual giving from execs this year (versus the federal PAC)."
If you want to argue about what "fundraising" means in this context, be my guest; but, I've probably heard it before, and I'll probably think you're either naive or deliberately obtuse. Are you expecting a single email that perfectly implicates the entire board of a multinational corp. in a crime? Do you expect a contract for illegal services to be included as an attachment or something?
It's quite obvious what they're doing, but being blind to nuance and expecting powerful people to be acting in good faith in the face of contradictory evidence go hand in hand.
"The law is clear: Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, making campaign contributions in the name of another person or otherwise concealing the true source of the funds is a felony if the contribution exceeds $2,000. In fact, both the person soliciting the contribution and the person who agrees to be reimbursed for it could be investigated. Even if neither is aware of the law."
source: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2007/december/electfraud_121...