That is not to say that these high-end transactions will shield Manhattan real estate from a slowdown in 2008.
"Given the prominence of real estate in the past decade," said Lawrence J. White, an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, "I am a little surprised we haven't seen more political pressure to tax high-end transactions".
Mossack Fonseca not only helped the Nahmads establish International Art Center in 1995, it provided many of its other clients with the tools to secretly carry out high-end art transactions worldwide for works by artists such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Chagall, Matisse, Basquiat and Warhol.
The government expects the tax increase on high-end real estate transactions to more than make up for the revenue lost because of the income tax cut.
This type of L.L.C. is used frequently in high-end real estate transactions, which The New York Times described extensively in the "Towers of Secrecy" series about how numerous foreigners use corporate facades to buy Manhattan condominiums.
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who two decades ago led a wide-ranging sales tax sting aimed at New York's most prominent jewelers, has collected about $22 million in unpaid sales taxes since he began investigating high-end art tax transactions in early 2002.
And two indicators of high-end momentum also rose: transactions over $900 increased by 3 percent, while the professional-contractor business, which handles expensive home renovations, posted increases in transactions and the amount spent.
Proposed: end individual income taxes, tax financial transactions, have high-end consumer taxes; reduce estate tax; tax currency transactions heavily; end corporate fraud (different books for IRS and stockholders, income-export tax fraud).
Increasingly, transactions for high-end properties are done in cash, using shell companies and limited-liability corporations — a web of legal obfuscation that can make the individual who paid for a property virtually impossible to identify.
From another perspective, investing in Mei.com makes sense for Alibaba because many of the items sold through cross-border e-commerce transactions are high-end products, like specialty food or designer goods.
