It's ALL in the Family.. :-))

Susoni

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Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain — who inherited a Phoenix beer distributorship that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars — will reap a tidy windfall from the $52 billion sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgian brewer InBev. But exactly how much she will make from the deal, which was announced Monday, is unclear.

A tall boy’s worth of digging and a nipper’s worth of algebra can shed some light, however.

The business that Mrs. McCain’s late father started a half-century ago, Hensley & Company, is the exclusive wholesaler of Budweiser, Bud Light, and other Anheuser-Busch products in the Phoenix area, and the third-largest A-B distributor in the nation, with upwards of $300 million in yearly sales. Mrs. McCain owns 34 percent of the company, though with her children and other relatives she controls two-thirds of the shares and all the voting stock, Arizona public records show.

Hensley & Company, in turn, owns a minimum of $1 million in Anheuser-Busch common stock, according to Mr. McCain’s most recent Senate financial disclosures. No maximum is given, but last year’s dividend income on that stock was between $50,001 and $100,000 in Anheuser-Busch stock, the disclosures show. And since Anheuser-Busch paid out dividends of $1.25 a share in 2007, it appears that Hensley owned between 40,000 and 80,000 shares.

That, in turn, suggests that the $70-per-share price InBev is paying will give Hensley a gain of roughly $1 million to $2 million compared to February, when speculation about the deal surfaced ­ and two-thirds of that would pencil out as the McCain family’s windfall. Q.E.D.

Mrs. McCain, who’s been known to zip around Phoenix in a car with “MS BUD” vanity plates, also owns $50,001 to $100,000 in A-B stock through her corporate retirement plan, and her dependent children own $15,001 to $50,000 of the stock, the disclosures show. They’ll of course enjoy much smaller gains from the InBev deal.

On the other hand, if the children were to cash out, they’d only have to pay capital gains tax at a rate of 15 percent under President Bush’s 2006 tax cuts, which Mr. McCain initially opposed but which he now supports. (Hensley & Company would presumably be subject to the corporate capital-gains rate of 35 percent, which was not lowered.)

Enough math in this heat. Now, for a cold