Barre Seid

Mr. Seid is a longtime conservative donor who made a fortune as the chairman and chief executive of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite. Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Leonard A. Leo's nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion. The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds. Mr. Seid has kept a low political profile in recent years. His last federal campaign donation, in 2008, was to a Republican running for Congress in Illinois, and his name has previously appeared only once in The Times, in 1990, for lending a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois nearly half a million dollars. His family foundation, the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, has operated with an annual budget of several million dollars, giving most often to the Chamber Opera Chicago, which Mr. Seid founded decades ago. He has been linked as a donor to some conservative causes in the past, though nothing at the scale of the Marble Freedom Trust.