You have to hand it to the private equity firm kingpins: they are skilled at financial sleight-of-hand which makes their already-lucrative investments even more attractive to them. But as the SEC has been exposing, too many of these tricks come at the expense of their investors.

The Wall Street Journal exposes the latest ruse tonight. While the dollar amounts aren’t earthshaking, the behavior is particularly shameless, and involves some of the biggest firms in the industry: KKR, Blackstone, and TPG. It shows that these firms are unafraid of engaging in out-and-out skimming as long as they dress it up in a way that is hard to ferret out.