CHICAGO_Democratic governor candidate J.B. Pritzker will repay the Cook County treasurer more than $330,000 worth of property-tax breaks and tax refunds that the county's inspector general contended were obtained as a result of a "scheme to defraud" taxpayers, his campaign said Tuesday.
The move came a day after a confidential report from Inspector General Patrick Blanchard became public, casting new light on an old line of attack by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner criticizing Pritzker as a "tax cheat" over the removal of toilets to help obtain a property-tax reduction from an adjoining Gold Coast mansion he purchased.
Blanchard found that Pritzker's wife, M.K. Pritzker, asked a contractor in 2015 to remove the mansion's five toilets to make the home uninhabitable so it could be reassessed at a lower value. M.K. Pritzker's brother and her personal assistant later made "false representations" in sworn affidavits to the assessor about the mansion's condition and when the toilets were removed, Blanchard found.
"The evidence indicates that the use of these affidavits was part of a scheme for obtaining money by means of false representations," Blanchard wrote.
Pritzker's campaign said the governor candidate will repay the county treasurer's office $132,747.18 for refunds obtained for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, as well as the value of additional tax savings of $198,684.85 for the years 2015 and 2016, by the end of the week.
The move, on the eve of the second face-to-face televised debate of the campaign, was aimed at quelling a controversy that threatened to upend the candidacy of the billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune.
