Gingrich Totally Broke

Newt Gingrich appears to be very close to totally broke. He may have some personal assets but his mini-empire has collapsed to greater depths than the eurozone.

Reuters reports:

When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich's campaign fund. A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches' net worth.

Gingrich's political campaign  is $4.8 million in debt. A political nonprofit he headed, American Solutions for Winning the Future, which raised $52 million between its founding in 2007 and its dissolution last July,  ended in debt.

Here's an informative account of how Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation collapsed. It implies members clearly paid big bucks and used Gingrich for access to power and then scurried from public glare once Gingrich decided to run for president (my bold):

The decline of the health policy center began earlier than previously realized. When Gingrich began considering a presidential bid in early 2010, "the membership began to drop off," according to Nancy Desmond, who served as managing partner of Gingrich Group LLC, which did business as the Center for Health Transformation. She was one of three owners of the company, but as the managing partner she alone testified at the May 9 meeting of creditors on the third floor of the Richard B. Russell Federal Building.

Opened in 2003, the center pulled in $59 million over nine years from more than 300 companies, some of which paid as much as $200,000 in dues. Among its activities, the center and Gingrich helped push a mandate requiring everyone to carry health insurance. At the time, the position was beneficial to the center's healthcare industry members, but Gingrich later repudiated it as a candidate.

Desmond said revenues fell from just under $7 million in 2010 to $4 million in 2011 and then to less than $300,000 in the first quarter of this year. Some $1.2 million in dues that had been expected earlier this year never materialized because those members also decided not to renew. By March the center was no longer able to pay the rent on its suite of offices in Atlanta and Washington.

In April it declared bankruptcy, leaving almost $600,000 in debts to outside vendors, half of it to Chain Bridge Bank, a boutique lending institution in McLean, Virginia, headed by former Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois. The company also owes the $6.4 million to Gingrich and his wife, Callista, neither of whom could be reached for comment.

During the creditors' meeting, bankruptcy trustee Barbara Stalzer noted that the center's tax returns showed it had been solvent as recently as the end of 2011. "How did it go from a 2011 tax return that seemed like everything was up to date and three months later it filed bankruptcy?"

Desmond replied that corporate members who were attracted to Gingrich as a policy promoter were worried about getting caught in the glare of the presidential campaign. "There were a lot of stories that began to appear in the paper, and (members) didn't necessarily want to be mentioned in a political story because they weren't political people. They were business people."