Paul Atkins, Trump’s selection to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, is yet another nominee with personal ties to a billionaire family.
By Jemima McEvoy, Forbes Staff
Last week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated lawyer and financier Paul Atkins as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government body responsible for regulating public companies and stock markets in the U.S. Atkins, 66, previously served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 under former President George W. Bush. He has been touted by Trump as a “proven leader for common sense regulations” and, crucially, a supporter of cryptocurrencies.
Despite his career in the public eye, Atkins’ link to one of the wealthiest families in the Midwest has not been previously reported. His wife Sarah Humphreys Atkins, whom he married in 1990, is the only granddaughter of Tamko Building Products founder E.L. Craig. An entrepreneur who had started and sold several ventures including a boxing gym and frozen custard shop, Craig started the roofing business in 1944 at the age of 69 in an old streetcar barn in Joplin, Missouri.
Now based in Galena, Kansas, Tamko is the fourth largest manufacturer of roofing shingles in the United States with $1.2 billion in revenue last year, according to a report from S&P Global.
The Humphreys family sold a 25% stake in the business to the Carlyle Group, a $447 billion (assets under management) private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum in 2019. The family still owns a 75% stake in Tamko, which is named after the first five states where the company planned to first do business: Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Bloomberg reported in April that the family and its minority investor may be considering a sale valuing the business at up to $3.5 billion. A person familiar with the company says Tamko has turned down offers higher than that.
Tamko founder E.L. Craig and his wife Mary Ethel Craig had just one child, Ethelmae Craig, who headed the company as its chairman for more than three decades. She was described as “the matriarch” of the now national roofing business at the time of her death in 2021.
Ethelmae and her husband John Pershing Humphreys (d. 1993), who was Tamko’s president for a time, had three children: David, John and Sarah. David and Sarah and their respective families now equally split the 75% stake. Based on Forbes estimates of the business, each couple is worth at least $1 billion.
All four of them – Sarah and Paul Atkins as well as David and Debra Humphreys – sit on Tamko’s board alongside representatives from Carlyle. The third Humphreys sibling, John, does not have an ownership stake and runs a separate roofing business, DaVinci Roofscapes, according to his LinkedIn page.
David Humphreys took over as president and CEO in 1994 after his father’s death. A libertarian who has given millions to Missouri Republicans, David has also been an outspoken critic of Trump. “At some point you just have to look in the mirror and recognize you cannot possibly justify support for Trump,” David told The Independent in 2016. After the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, David declared his nearly $3 million in past donations to Sen. Josh Hawley (R -Miss.), a prominent backer of Trump’s false claims that he lost the election due to widespread fraud, as “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” He also funds the Joplin, Missouri-based EL Craig Foundation, a $7 million (assets) charity that supports conservative organizations and think tanks like the Institute for Humane Studies, a nonprofit that promotes the study of classical liberalism in schools.
Sarah has served on Tamko’s board for more than a quarter century, and is also an active political donor. She’s given at least $7.7 million since 2002 – almost all to Republicans – according to data from OpenSecrets. Sarah is the president and single largest donor to the J. P. Humphreys Foundation. Also based in Joplin, this charitable foundation gives away roughly $3 million a year largely to conservative groups including The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and the Cato Institute, a free market-Washington, D.C. think tank where her brother David is a board member. Sarah has given more than $33 million to the J.P. Humphreys Foundation since 2010, according to public filings.
Her husband Paul Atkins is a director at both Sarah’s and David’s foundations; he has also enjoyed a successful career in his own right. A North Carolina native, he began working in corporate law at New York City’s Davis Polk & Wardwell in 1984, the same firm where David Humphreys worked before joining Tamko as general counsel in 1989. After his stint as an SEC commissioner under Bush, Atkins launched Patomak Global Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in advising financial services companies including banks and crypto firms on regulatory compliance, in 2009. The firm is located in Washington, D.C., a block away from the White House.
Atkins and the Humphreys have had overlapping business interests in the past. Atkins was listed as a director at three different offshore entities either owned or affiliated with the Humphreys family. That’s according to data made public as part of the 2016 Panama Papers, a leak of more than 11.5 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which assisted clients with setting up offshore companies and other entities.
The three Humphreys-linked entities – EQB Offshore Ltd., Midwest Insurance Company Ltd. and Tamcap Insurance Ltd. – were registered in Bermuda in between 2000 and 2008. Both EQB Offshore Ltd. and Midwest Insurance Company Ltd., which appear to be affiliated, were owned by trusts named for Sarah and David and served as “captive insurance companies” providing insurance policies to Tamko Building Products, the person familiar with the company said. (These outfits were taxed as U.S. corporations and paid U.S. taxes, according to the source.) EQB has been liquidated, while the other two entities are dormant. Atkins and his wife Sarah served as directors at all three until 2013.
According to S&P Global analyst Marc Lazo, who covers Tamko’s debt, the Humphreys have been “somewhat aggressive” compared to their peers in paying hefty dividends. S&P calculates that the firm’s owners will distribute at least $100 million in dividends to themselves this year, or about 90% to 95% of the company’s free cash flow. In 2021, Tamko’s owners paid themselves a $250 million dividend, according to an S&P report from the time.
As a couple, Atkins and his wife certainly appear to enjoy the trappings of wealth. In addition to a nearly $3 million home in Arlington, Virginia, property records show that they own an $8 million (estimated worth) 6,000 square foot beach house built along three adjoining parcels on Anna Maria island just off the Florida coast about an hour from Sarasota.
While he is not himself a billionaire, Atkins is one of at least a dozen billionaires, billionaire spouses or members of billionaire families (some by marriage) who have been nominated by Trump for everything from cabinet positions to ambassadors. Others include: Jared Isaacman (NASA), Charles Kushner (Ambassador to France), Howard Lutnick (Commerce Secretary), Warren Stephens (Ambassador to the UK), Tilman Fertitta (Ambassador to Italy), Kelly Loeffler (Small Business Administration), Linda McMahon (Secretary of Education), Elon Musk (co-head of DOGE), Mehmet Oz (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid), Vivek Ramaswamy (co-head of DOGE) and Steve Witkoff (special Middle East envoy).
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