ICYMI: Herschel Walker Claims to Own Companies That Don’t Exist [The Daily Beast]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The Daily Beast: Herschel Walker Claims to Own Companies That Don’t Exist
By Roger Sollenberger
April 13, 2022

Georgia Senate candidate’s history of exaggerating his business success is even worse than anyone thought.

Key Points:

• Herschel Walker has… for whatever reason, chosen to dramatically inflate his business record, according to a Daily Beast investigation.

• In doing so, Walker has established a parallel record of demonstrably false claims, many of which appear to bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever.

• While Walker’s business record has been picked over before—including in an Associated Press review of “exaggerated claims of financial success”—The Daily Beast has reviewed documents and other records that shine new light on previously unexamined, and particularly egregious, false claims.

• While the chasm between Walker’s vision and reality often appears staggering—and applies not just to business but to multiple dimensions of his personal life as well—he might be playing fast and loose with the concept of “ownership.”

• It’s unclear whether he transposed this fanciful structure onto his candidate financial disclosure, which claims a net worth of between $29 million and $65 million, and which, according to a Georgia Public Broadcasting report, merits further scrutiny.

• The claims about the upholstery business appear particularly divorced from the truth, as that business, as Walker describes it, doesn’t appear to exist.

• According to a review of business records, that company—either Renaissance Manufacturing or Renaissance Hospitality, depending on the telling (though both are now dissolved)—was not his in any common sense of ownership.

• That fact didn’t deter Walker from boasting again and again that it was his company, repeatedly implying sole proprietorship—even saying as recently as a speech this February that he “started” the business.

• Similar statements pop up again and again, going back several years. And even today, the website for his company—H. Walker Enterprises LLC—lists “textile fabrication” among its areas of expertise, claiming the “HWE and Renaissance Hospitality provides major hotels, restaurants and hospitals with custom fabric bedding, drapery and window treatments.”

• It’s unclear, however, what business Walker is referencing, because Renaissance Hospitality dissolved last year. Walker also isn’t on the articles of dissolution; his friend and former business partner, George Mappin, is.

• Of course, Walker’s concept of ownership appears to have always been loose. For instance… [Walker] repeatedly inflated the size and revenue of another company, Renaissance Man Foods, including in statements on the campaign trail. Over the years, Walker has claimed numerous times, falsely, that Renaissance Man is the largest minority-owned food business in the country.

• In October, he told a UFC-themed podcast, “I own a food company—that’s going to freak you out—I own the largest minority-owned food company in the United States.”

• The Daily Beast’s review shows that this is nowhere near accurate.

• The Associated Press reported that, in recent interviews, Walker has touted annual revenues between $70 million and $80 million. But The Daily Beast obtained a deposition in federal court from 2019, where Walker pegged the combined net earnings of three related entities—Simmons Foods, Renaissance Man Foods, and H. Walker Enterprises—at $14 million.

• These are by far not the first specious business claims linked to Walker, which range from the serious to the bizarre.

See Also: Georgia Public Broadcasting: ​​Ethics experts say Herschel Walker’s U.S. Senate financial disclosure bears further scrutiny; CNN: GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker has been overstating his academic achievements for years; Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Herschel Walker’s business record reveals creditor lawsuits, exaggerated claims; 11Alive: Herschel Walker mocked businesses that took PPP money, even though he used it himself: report

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