The Mormon Church owns the most valuable property portfolio in America
At least $15,700,000,000 in holdings.
More than five years ago, the MormonLeaks organization was founded to investigate and reveal corruption within the Latter Day Saints Church, from gender bias to financial transparency. After weathering baseless legal attacks from the church, the organization redoubled its efforts, changing its name to Truth and Transparency and expanding its remit to all organized religion.
In its latest report, Truth and Transparency chip away at the LDS Church’s financial opacity, revealing 15,963 parcels (1,754,633 acres)of property holdings across the USA, with a minimum value of $15.7 billion.
Truth and Transparency was able to do this sleuthing thanks to a failure in the Church’s secrecy methods. While examining the records of known Church holdings, researchers noticed that each one of these properties was tied to a common address, no matter which holding company or other entity nominally owned it.
By feeding this address into Reonomy’s database of commercial US properties, they were able to pull up a massive data-set of suspected LDS…
