The (modified) 'Herbalife (HLF)' fairy story, will still have a happy ending, according to Meredith Adler.

'Mystic Meg' is the comically-inept 'astrologer' who was paid to publish a regular column in the (now defunct) UK newspaper, 'The News of the World,' but who (predictably) completely failed to predict her corporate employer's demise. ('The News of the World,' was part of Rupert Murdoch's 'News Corp'). 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_Meg

Meredith Adler  - a long-time believer in the 'Herbalife' fairy story and who (predictably) has completely failed to predict its demise - is Managing Director at Barclays Capital and a financial analyst  (i.e. she has been paid to predict the future stock market value of publicly-quoted food and drug companies). As far as I'm aware, Ms. Adler has absolutely no experience in the investigation of major organised crime or cults. Thus, when it comes to finding, let alone analysing, what's been hiding in plain sight behind the effectively-valueless corporate front known as, 'Herbalife,' the comically-inept Ms. Adler, has been just another useful idiot. Indeed, she might as well have called herself Mystic Meredith.

Even one of 'Herbalife’s' most wildly-optimistic casual observers (and de facto cheer leaders), Barclays' Meredith Adler, now says that 2015 will be another disastrous year for 'Herbalife', but she still doesn't even begin to comprehend that 'Herbalife' has been a counterfeit 'direct selling' company fronting a closed-market swindle and related advance fee frauds, because these tragicomic matters evidently remain beyond her own less-than-pathetic level of understanding.

Mystic Mark Hughes (author of the 'Herbalife' fairy story)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJaeFP3UYQ

In 1985, following intense media and political interest, the California Attorney General sued 'Herbalife' for 'making inflated claims about the efficacy of its products' (i.e. lying to US consumers by telling them that 'Herbalife' products not only enabled people to lose or gain weight without altering their diet, but also cured, and/or prevented, almost every known human illness). In 1986, Mark Hughes jumped at the chance to settle the suit for a derisory $850,000 (without admitting any fault) and 'Herbalife' was generously allowed to continue 'trading' provided it respected the conditions of the settlement. 

Since that time, the bosses of the 'Herbalife' racket have, in fact, driven a coach and horses through the settlement which (mysteriously) has never been enforced. Laughably, on pain of immediate closure, it was absolutely forbidden for 'Herbalife' employees or agents, to make false (and potentially lethal) claims about its products having medicinal qualities.

Evidently, now believing themselves to be completely above the law, in 1986, Mark Hughes and his associates (including his attorneys, bankers, accountants etc.) then committed securities fraud when 'Herbalife' became a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ - pretending  US$1 billion annual sales. Obviously, without specifying what was the actual unlawful internal origin of all this apparently lawful external annual revenue. The overwhelming majority of the counterfeit 'direct sales' company's declared annual revenue had, in fact, always been secretly deriving from its own constantly-churning, deluded agents' losing investment payments (based on their false expectation of future reward) laundered as 'sales' (based on value and demand). This was simply because 'Herbalife's' exorbitantly-priced, up-dated snake-oil was effectively-unsaleable on the open-market (i.e. to persons with fully-functioning critical, and evaluative, faculties). Thus, given these irrefutable facts, anyone with an ounce common-sense should have been immediately able to deduce that, since the dangerous charlatans behind 'Herbalife' had been peddling medical alchemy to an unsuspecting public, the very strong likelihood was that they had also been peddling economic alchemy, but neither this blindingly-obvious analysis nor the interests of the public, ever seems to have crossed regulators' minds.

Mark Hughes died (aged 44) May 20th, 2000. Officially, Hughes had been celebrating the 87th birthday of his maternal grandmother with a private party attended by just a few family members at his mansion in Malibu. In the months prior to Hughes' death, he was controversially trying to buy all outstanding shares of 'Herbalife' and take the company private again. According to his medical records, Hughes' mental and physical state of health were not at all the same as his 100% positive, squeaky-clean, happy and healthy, public image had portrayed. He was, in fact, recovering from a recurrence of pneumonia. To accentuate the effect of antibiotics, Hughes' treatment had involved steroids ( a standard procedure). However, again according to his medical records, the steroids had 'made sleeping difficult,' but instead of sleeping tablets, his doctor had (for unexplained reasons) prescribed a powerful, tricyclic antidepressant (TCA), Doxepin. Although TCAs can sometimes be prescribed for chronic insomnia, they are not primarily used for the treatment of temporary insomnia caused by other prescribed drugs.

TCAs are used primarily in the clinical treatment of mood disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD), dysthymia, and treatment-resistant variants. They are also used in the treatment of a number of other medical disorders, including anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social phobia (SP) also known as social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and panic disorder (PD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, certain personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder (BPD), Neurological disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson's disease^[5] as well aschronic pain, neuralgia or neuropathic pain, and fibromyalgia, headache, or migraine, smoking cessation, tourette syndrome, trichotillomania, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), interstitial cystitis(IC), nocturnal enuresis (NE), narcolepsy, insomnia, pathological crying and/or laughing, chronic hiccups, ciguatera poisoning, and as an adjunct in schizophrenia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricyclic_antidepressant

Almost immediately (and without any real investigation), May 21st, 2000, authorities announced that Mark Hughes had 'died of an accidental overdose after mixing alcohol with a "toxic level" of antidepressants. ' Scott Carrier, of the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, later said final autopsy results found that Hughes had ingested a toxic combination of alcohol and Doxepin, an antidepressant he was taking to help him to sleep. His blood-alcohol level was measured at 0.21, more than 2 1/2 times the legal limit for driving.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/12/business/binge-led-to-death-of-herbalife-founder.html

August 12th, 2000, it was reported in the New York Times that Mark Hughes:

• had died after a 4 day drinking binge. 
• smoked 6 or 8 corona cigars each day.
• was being treated by a psychiatrist for chronic alcoholism.

Following Hughes sudden death, his personal attorney, Conrad Klein, assumed control of all his corporate fronts for racketeering activity including 'Herbalife, The Herbalife Family Foundation' and 'The Mark Hughes Trust.'

The Herbalife racket survived, and grew, after Hughes' death and, in 2002, it was acquired for US$685 million by J.H. Whitney & Company and Golden Gate Capital. The main front company was taken back to being private.

In April 2003, Michael O. Johnson joined 'Herbalife' as CEO following a 17-year career with Disney (most recently as President of Walt Disney International). The irony of this is exquisite; for Michael Johnson was eminently well-qualified to run 'Herbalife.' He was, after all, highly experienced when it came to marketing repackaged, but unoriginal, fairy stories to a wide-eyed public.

On December 16, 2004, 'Herbalife' had an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange of 14,500,000 common shares at $14 per share. In order to perpetrate this new securities fraud, Michael Johnson and his criminal associates, simply declared 'Herbalife' to have $1.3 billion of annual sales. Obviously, again without specifying what was the actual unlawful internal origin of all this apparently lawful external annual revenue. Incredibly, again no regulator bothered to look at the evidence, apply common-sense and deduce what lurked behind the essentially-absurd 'Herbalife' fairy story.





The total value of the securities fraud rose to around US$7 billions when effectively valueless Herbalife shares were trading high. None of this would have been possible, if Hughes had lived, but (somewhat surprisingly) there doesn't ever seem to have been a rigorous independent investigation into whether he was murdered or pushed into suicide.

In order for Ms. Adler to understand-fully what's really been going on right under her nose, she's going to have to face the ego-destroying fact that she's been duped by a gang of outrageous quacks dressed up as philanthropic businessmen.

That said, Michael Johnson and his criminal associates, have been slightly more convincing performers than the even more-outrageous Mark Hughes and his own criminal associates, but they have all been playing exactly the same unoriginal roles in exactly the same game of make-believe.

America's first woman Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has been an enthusiastic promoter of the 'Herbalife' fairy story, but companies controlled by Ms. Albright have received at least 10 millions stolen dollars from the 'Herbalife' racketeers.

Pamela Jones Harbour ( b. 1959) is currently under contract to the 'Herbalife' racketeers, but (although she will deny reality) the co-opting of this legally-qualified, former, senior US federal regulator, is just another part of an overall pattern of ongoing major racketeering activity stretching back through seven decades; for Ms. Jones Harbour has clearly been paid with stolen money and, in return, she's been effectively-obstructing the investigation of the wider criminogenic phenomenon of blame-the-victim  'MLM income opportunity' racketeering.

A strong clue as to how Ms. Jones Harbour was approached, groomed and co-opted, is that she has claimed to be 'a Herbalife customer.' Ms. Jones Harbour has been quoted as saying that she bought her first Formula 1 weight-loss shake powder from a family member at a meeting in 2004 just to be nice. She liked it, though, especially the Cookies ’n Cream flavor, and would occasionally mix up a shake for dinner after a long night at the FTC.

Ms. Adler is far from being alone blocking the doorway to  'Herbalife' intellectual bunker  . 

Mystic Michael Johnson (peddler of the 'Herbalife' fairy story)

After hanging out with the  'Herbalife' mob in Orlando Florida last week, even Mystic Meredith, was obliged suddenly to slash her 2015 'Herbalife' earnings forecast by almost one third.

Her new prediction for 2015, is one quarter beneath that of Herbalife’s own figure published in November 2014.

According to Ms. Adler, Herbalife will earn $322 million in 2015, down from $503 million in 2014.  However, in 2016, she is predicting a smaller drop, to $309 million, but even these figures are still a financial fairy story, because in the world of quantifiable reality, it's looking increasingly likely that the big lie entitled 'Herbalife,' will not exist by the end of 2015.

During the last 12 months, as 'Herbalfe's' monopoly of information has gradually been crumbling, effectively-valueless shares in this dissimulated racket, have plunged by 57%.

David Brear (copyright 2015)