A former investment director for the Mormon Church claims that more than $100 billion earmarked for philanthropic work ended up being placed in the organization’s hedge fund.

“It was actually a secret hedge fund,” David Nielsen said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes.

The public interest witness, who filed a complaint with the IRS in 2019, previously ran the church’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, for nine years. Nielsen, himself a devout Mormon, was first hired to work at Ensign Peak while working on Wall Street.

“I thought we were going to change the world,” Nielsen said. “We just increased our bank account“.

The Ensign Peak Advisors Investment Fund is considered a supporting organization for the church because it allows it to operate on a non-profit basis. Moreover, by separating its business activities into an investment fund, the Mormon church can raise money tax-free.if its purposes are exclusively religious, educational or charitable.

He said the church company was turned into a charity to avoid billions of dollars in taxes by falsifying records and misleading believers. Each year, the Church raised about $7 billion from its 17 million members.. The Mormon Church encourages its members to give 10% of their income to charity. The church claims to have donated $2.2 billion in cash and in kind to 197 countries since 1985.

The records show that money from the church reserve was used for commercial ventures, including a mall in Salt Lake City. which was built on church land and an insurance company owned by the church.

Nielsen resigned in 2019 after the Mormon Leaks website linked church members to shell companies that hold billions of dollars of stock and bonds, assets effectively controlled by Ensign Peake.

According to the Guardian