At the same time he was too “depressed” to pay his taxes, Charles O’Byrne, the disgraced former top aide to Gov. Paterson, was able to bankroll his younger boyfriend’s grad-school tuition.
O’Byrne quit his $178,500-a-year position as Paterson’s chief-of-staff two weeks ago after The Post revealed he had failed to pay $293,000 in taxes over a five-year period.
His lawyers blamed clinical depression and “nonfiler’s syndrome,” a purported psychological affliction that turned O’Byrne, a 49-year-old, openly gay, ex-Jesuit priest, into a laughingstock.
But documents and interviews show that during the years O’Byrne was supposedly unable to pay the taxman, he opened his wallet to handsome graduate student Sridhar Venkatapuram, now a 37-year-old research fellow at University College London.
Venkatapuram, a Hyderabad, India-born scholar and gay activist, received a “tuition support/loan” “in excess of $1,000” in 2006 from O’Byrne, according to O’Byrne’s financial disclosure statements.
O’Byrne filed late income-tax returns that year, the first time he filed anything since 2001. He didn’t start making back payments until 2007, O’Byrne’s lawyer said.
When Venkatapuram received the tuition money from O’Byrne, he was pursuing his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and divided his time between the United Kingdom and O’Byrne’s Stuyvesant Town apartment, documents show.
Venkatapuram, reached last week by phone at his office at University College London, where he is lecturing on “social justice,” said, “I’m not really in touch with Charles O’Byrne anymore, and I don’t want to talk about him. I have nothing to say.”
Friends of O’Byrne confirmed that the two are no longer romantically involved.
O’Byrne was also a generous donor to gay-advocacy groups during his tax-scofflaw days.
On Oct. 20, he was a “leading patron,” or $1,250 donor, at the Empire State Pride Agenda’s fall dinner.
He paid off the remaining $3,641.85 he owed in taxes the next day.
O’Byrne declined comment.
Additional reporting by Tim Stewart in London and Kavita Mokha in New York