Mayor Bloomberg now has 11 homes, after buying two more New York properties

Mayor Bloomberg now has 11 homes, after buying two more New York properties

It’s home, sweet homes for Mayor Bloomberg.

The billionaire mayor gobbled up two more properties last year, expanding his real-estate holdings to 11. And that doesn’t count Gracie Mansion, where he’s entitled to live but which he has shunned.

Financial-disclosure records the mayor released yesterday show he bought a $4.55 million ranch in North Salem in June 2011, adding to the $3.65 million spread he acquired there in 2001.  Mayoral aides didn’t say why Bloomberg needed a second home in the exclusive Westchester town that counts David Letterman among its residents.

But North Salem is horse country and the mayor’s younger daughter, Georgina, is an accomplished equestrian who keeps horses there and in Florida.

Under a special arrangement, Bloomberg allowed the seller, Joseph Pinto, to stay on at a rent of $100,000 to $250,000 for 207 days.

Three months after closing that deal, Bloomberg plunked down another $20 million for a grand estate in the Hamptons.

So he’s now paying taxes on places in London, Bermuda, Vail, Colo., Armonk, Wellington, Fla., and New York City, where three properties are held in his name. The latter three are his Upper East Side town house, his foundation property and a condo.  As usual, the mayor released a “re-creation” of his annual tax returns that substituted broad letter categories for the actual numbers. And as usual, the 116 pages in the federal returns were littered with “G’s,” the top category of $500,000 and up.

All indications were that Bloomberg, one of the wealthiest men in the United States with an estimated net worth of $22 billion, is doing better than ever.  His lucrative information-services firm now has 99 subsidiaries, including ones in Egypt and Nigeria, up from 89 in 2010 and more than double the number when he took office in 2002.  Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser said Bloomberg “repatriates all profits back to New York” and had a federal tax rate of 34.69 percent before his charitable deductions. The top federal rate is 35 percent.

But Loeser refused to say what Bloomberg’s rate was after the charitable deductions, claiming that might give competitors information they shouldn’t have.“If you had that, you’d be able to figure out what the distributions were to 85 percent of the company’s owners,” said Loeser, referring to Bloomberg himself, who owns 85 percent of the privately held Bloomberg LP.  Tax rates have become an issue in the presidential race, and the mayor has gone on record calling for an across-the-board tax hike to help reduce the deficit.

Bloomberg continued his generosity to his ex-wife, Susan, whom he divorced in 1993. He provided her with a bridge loan of more than $500,000 for an apartment while she sold her old place on Lafayette Street.