Local Posts : Staffa

Feb 25, 2020 10:48:19 GMT vikingeck said:

To be quite clear, I do not "hate" these stamps from Staffa and other islands. What I do find unforgiveable were the actions of Feigenbaum and others who produced them to exploit the surging interest in new collectors in the 1970s stamp boom. It was greedy exploitation aimed at new collectors.

  

I agree wholeheartedly that these stamps were issued as a money-making scheme to exploit collectors.  The exploitative nature is such that, as a topical collector, I find the need to include these to ensure the "completeness" of the topical collection, despite my efforts to resist.  In short, "ya kinda gotta have 'em" to complete the collection.  Of course, I only buy them when they are super cheap.

An interesting aspect of the later issues produced by Clive Feigenbaum and his cohorts is that their production was intended as a tax shelter in the United States.  Feigenbaum, who was perpetually involved in philatelic schemes and scandals, sought to exploit holes in the income tax laws of the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The history:

Sometime before 1979, the British government granted the Laird of Staffa and several other Scottish islands a right to issue postage stamps. The stamps would be good only for the carriage of mail between points on the islands or to the nearest British post office, where regular British postage would have to be affixed it the mail were to travel further.

Beginning in 1979, a British corporation called Crailheath, Ltd., started acquiring stamp production rights from the islands' owners.  Crailheath was owned by Clive Feigenbaum.  Crailheath assigned its stamp production rights to Global International, a Liberian corporation said to be owned by Feigenbaum.  Global had sets of stamp printing plates, called masters, manufactured at approximately $1000 per master.

Through Philatelic Leasing, Ltd., a corporation owned by Feigenbaum, and Dell Philatelic Consultants, Ltd., a Massachusetts corporation purportedly owned or controlled by Feigenbaum, the masters were offered for lease as an investment.  The leases were promoted by Dell as a tax shelter to investors.  Philatelic Leasing and Dell proceeded to value the masters at excessive prices, well beyond the original cost of approximately $1000 each.  The leaseholders would be allowed to produce a fixed number of stamps from the plates they leased.  Under the laws at the time, the leaseholders could claim an investment tax credit of 10 percent against Philatelic Leasing's inflated costs of the printing plates.  The leaseholders could also claim a tax deduction for lease payments.  The combination of these two tax credits/reductions would result in a net reduction of income taxes paid by high-tax-bracket investors over the course of the lease periods to an extent that the tax reductions would exceed the costs of the leases (or so it was promoted).

In a lawsuit, United States v. Philatelic Leasing, Ltd., 601 F. Supp.1554 (S.D.N.Y.), aff'd, 794 F. 2d 781 (2nd Circuit, 1986), the U.S. government sought to close down Philatelic Leasing's tax shelter operations under the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982.  The U.S. government prevailed.