Taxpayers pay $550k salary to Whitmer’s corporate welfare recipient

Metro Detroit busi­ness­woman Fay Bey­doun receives a $550,000 salary through a $20 mil­lion state tax­pay­er-fund­ed cor­po­rate wel­fare scheme.

The Detroit News reports:

A dis­clo­sure of Beydoun’s salary at Glob­al Link Inter­na­tion­al was con­tained in Michi­gan Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Corp. doc­u­ments obtained by The News in what appears to be a draft memo Bey­doun sent to the agency last month updat­ing state offi­cials on how she is spend­ing grant mon­ey the Leg­is­la­ture award­ed her in 2022. […]

Accord­ing to her quar­ter­ly reports, Glob­al Link has spent about $2.8 mil­lion of the $20 mil­lion grant it was allo­cat­ed by the Repub­li­can-led Leg­is­la­ture and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nor in 2022. The non­prof­it received the first $10 mil­lion of the grant in 2023. About $361,740 of that $2.8 mil­lion was spent in the last three months of 2024.

Bey­doun’s Glob­al Link Inter­na­tion­al grant was one of dozens of pet projects that law­mak­ers insert­ed into the annu­al state bud­get in June 2022 that raised eye­brows because of recip­i­ents’ polit­i­cal con­nec­tions, sparse infor­ma­tion on the leg­isla­tive spon­sor or ques­tions about the via­bil­i­ty of the busi­ness plan.

Read the full report at the Detroit News.

They report that in addi­tion to the extrav­a­gant pay, Fay Bey­doun has spent Michi­gan tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey on a lav­ish lifestyle, includ­ing a $4,500 cof­fee machine. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Bey­doun is a Whit­mer appointee and Demo­c­rat donor.

In short, Bey­doun is paid an astro­nom­i­cal salary by Michi­gan tax­pay­ers, so she can lob­by for even more mon­ey from Michi­gan tax­pay­ers.

Ain’t that the life…