Paul Atkins, President Trump’s choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, is another candidate with personal ties to the billionaire’s family.
Written by Jemima McEvoy, Forbes Staff
Last week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated lawyer and financier Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency responsible for regulating public companies and the stock market in the United States. Mr. Atkins, 66, served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2002. In 2008, under former President George W. Bush. He has been touted by President Trump as a “proven leader of common-sense regulation” and a decisive supporter of cryptocurrencies.
Despite Atkins’ career being in the public eye, his ties to one of the Midwest’s wealthiest families had previously gone unreported. His wife, Sarah Humphries Atkins, whom he married in 1990, is the only granddaughter of Tamco Building Products founder Elle Craig. An entrepreneur who started and sold several businesses, including a boxing gym and a frozen custard shop, Craig started his roofing business in 1944 at the age of 69 in an old streetcar barn in Joplin, Missouri.
Tamco, currently based in Galena, Kansas, is the fourth largest shingle maker in the U.S., with sales of $1.2 billion last year, according to a report from S&P Global.
In 2019, the Humphries family sold a 25% stake in the business to Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $447 billion in assets under management, for an undisclosed amount. The family still owns 75% of Tamco, for which it was named. The first five states the company originally planned to operate in were Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Bloomberg reported in April that the family and its minority investors may be considering selling the business at a valuation of up to $3.5 billion. Tamco has turned down offers beyond that, according to people familiar with the company.
Tamko founder EL Craig and his wife Mary Ethel Craig have one child, Ethelmae Craig, who led the company as chairman for more than 30 years. At the time of her death in 2021, she was now described as the “patriarch” of the national roofing business.
Ethelmay and her husband, John Pershing Humphreys (died 1993), who at one time was president of Tamco, had three children, David, John and Sarah. David and Sarah and their respective families currently split 75% of the shares equally. Based on Forbes Business estimates, each couple is worth at least $1 billion.
Sarah Atkins and Paul Atkins, David Humphries and Debra Humphries all sit on Tamco’s board of directors, along with representatives from Carlyle. Humphrey’s third brother, John, does not own the property and runs a separate roofing business, Da Vinci Roofscapes, according to his LinkedIn page.
David Humphries became president and CEO in 1994 after the death of his father. David, a liberal who has donated millions of dollars to Missouri Republicans, has been an outspoken critic of Trump. “At some point you have to look in the mirror and realize that you can’t justify your support for Trump,” David told The Independent in 2016. After the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, David declared nearly $3 million in assets. In past donations to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mississippi), a prominent supporter called President Trump’s false claim that he lost the election due to widespread fraud “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” It was. He also funds the EL Craig Foundation, based in Joplin, Missouri. The foundation is a $7 million (assets) charity that supports conservative organizations and think tanks, including the Humane Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the study of classical liberalism in schools.
Sarah has served on Tamco’s board of directors for more than a quarter of a century and is an active political donor. She has donated at least $7.7 million since 2002, most of it to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets data. Sarah is the president and single largest donor of the JP Humphries Foundation. The philanthropic foundation, also based in Joplin, primarily supports conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Research and the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C., where his brother David is a director. It donates approximately $3 million annually to organizations. member. Sarah has donated more than $33 million to the JP Humphries Foundation since 2010, according to public documents.
Her husband, Paul Atkins, serves on the boards of both Sarah and David Foundations. He has enjoyed a successful career himself. A native of North Carolina, he began working in corporate law in 1984 at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City. This is the firm where David Humphreys worked before joining Tamco as general counsel in 1989. After serving as SEC commissioner under the Bush administration, Atkins is the founder of Patmac Global Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in advising financial services companies, including banks and crypto companies, on regulatory compliance. 2009. The company is located in Washington, DC, one block from the White House.
Mr. Atkins and Mr. Humphries have had overlapping business interests in the past. Mr Atkins was listed as a director of three different offshore entities owned or associated with the Humphries family. This is according to data released as part of the 2016 Panama Papers, which revealed more than 11.5 million claims from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that helped clients set up offshore companies and other business entities. It’s a document leak.
Three entities associated with Humphreys, EQB Offshore Ltd., Midwest Insurance Company Ltd., and Tamcap Insurance Ltd., were registered in Bermuda between 2000 and 2008. EQB Offshore Ltd. and Midwest Insurance Company Ltd. both appear to be related. was owned by a trust named after Sarah and David and acted as a “captive insurance company” providing insurance policies to Tamco Building Products, a company familiar with the company. Said. (The entities were taxed as U.S. corporations and paid U.S. taxes, the people said.) EQB has been liquidated, and the other two entities are dormant. Atkins and his wife Sarah served on the boards of all three companies until 2013.
Mark Lazo, an S&P Global analyst who covers Tamco’s debt, said the Humphreys has been “a little more aggressive” in paying out large dividends than its peers. S&P calculates that the company’s owners will distribute at least $100 million in dividends to the company this year. In 2021, Tamco’s owners paid themselves approximately 90% to 95% of the company’s free cash flow. According to an S&P report at the time, the dividend was
As a couple, Atkins and his wife certainly seem to enjoy the trappings of wealth. Property records show a nearly $3 million home in Arlington, Virginia, plus an $8 million (estimated value) home built along three contiguous parcels on Anna Maria Island, about an hour off the Florida coast from Sarasota. ) is shown owning a 6,000 square foot beach house. .
Although Mr. Atkins is not a billionaire himself, at least a dozen billionaires, spouses of billionaires, or family members of billionaires (some of them (by marriage). Others: Jared Isaacman (NASA), Charles Kushner (Ambassador to France), Howard Lutnick (Secretary of Commerce), Warren Stevens (Ambassador to the United Kingdom), Tilman Fertitta (Ambassador to Italy), Kelly Loeffler ( Small Business Administration), Linda McMahon (Secretary of Education), Elon Musk (DOGE Mehmet Oz (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid), Vivek Ramaswamy (DOGE Co-Director), and Steve Witkoff (Middle East Special Envoy).
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