With an irony close to exquisite, 'Herbalife' useful idiot, Lionel Messi, has been convicted of, and sentenced to 21 months in prison for, tax fraud. Although the case is apparently to be appealed through the Spanish Supreme Court.
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| Jorge Messi |
Lionel Messi's father, Jorge Messi, was handed the same 21 month jail sentence for defrauding Spain of €4.1m between 2007 and 2009. The pair were found guilty of three counts of tax fraud by a court in Barcelona.
Messi and his father face millions of euros in further fines and penalties for employing tax havens in Belize and Uruguay to stash $ multi-millions earnings from image rights. Yet, even if their appeal fails, neither man is expected to serve any time behind bars; for under the current Spanish judicial system, prison terms of less than two years can be served on probation.
Lionel Messi has already been fined about €2m and his father €1.5m. They made a voluntary €5m 'corrective payment' (the unpaid tax plus interest), in August 2013.
During the trial, Lionel Messi insisted that he 'knew nothing' about the management of his financial affairs, claiming that his father dealt with all such matters while he was 'playing football'.
However, Jorge Messi claimed he was incapable of organising such a fraud. He insisted that his own tax consultants were to blame.
Lionel Messi (estimated wealth €200 millions) quite obviously doesn't give a shit when it comes to stealing from ordinary people, and it is not difficult to imagine what he (and his dear old dad) will have to say about his 'Herbalife' paymasters when they finally get held to account.
David Brear (copyright 2016)
What exactly were the Herbalife products? Were they the usual generic-quality crap that Amway pushes?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - Yes it's just 'Amway Nutrilite' with a different label.
DeleteThe 'Herbalife' products are up-dated 'Eat Me Drink Me' snake-oil in the form of cure-all pills and potions, shakes, etc. Whatever vulnerable individuals need to believe about this wonderland wampum, the 'Herbalife' recruiters and propaganda steadfastly reflect as reality. If you are overweight: 'Herbalife' can help you to lose weight, if you are underweight: it can help you to gain weight. If you are sick, poor and miserable: it can make you healthy, happy and prosperous, but only if you believe 100% in 'Herbalife' and buy and consume it regulary whilst trying to find others to duplicate the same belief system.
Classically of a cult, by this closed logic, when you inevitably fail to receive any quantifiable benefit from regularly buying and consuming 'Herbalife' wampum, you only have yourself to blame (because you didn't believe totally)..
In all 'MLM' rackets, because they have been effectively unsaleable on the open market (to members of the general public with fully-functioning critical faculties) the wampum products' hidden function has been to launder unlawful losing investment payments into dissimulated closed-market swindles (a.k.a. pyramid scams)
Your choice of the term "wampum" to describe the products juggled by the various MLM schemes is an inspired one. These American Indian shell-bead belts had no intrinsic value or importance; they were merely honorific badges, valued for ratifying exchanges or pacts. The same is true for Amway or Herbalife products -- they serve as a convenient legal fig-leaf for what is really happening.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - Thanks - I first used the word, 'wampum', more than 15 years ago to describe accurately the 'products' (i.e. effectively-unsaleable investment commodities often of a dubious pseudo-medical nature) being used to camouflage serious criminal activity in dozens of 'Amway' copy-cat 'MLM' rackets. The day law enforcement agents and prosecutors finally work out how the 'MLM' trick has been pulled and universally adopt an accurate terminology, is the day when we will know that this pernicious criminogenic cultic phenomenon has been halted.
DeleteCurrently, quite a number of well-informed observers of the 'MLM' phenomenon have adopted the term 'wampum' in their discussions on the Mumsnet forum.
You might be interested to know that I had a considerable knowledge of the history of wampum, because I used to have colleagues in London who dealt in ethnographic antiques and who had actually bought and sold examples of Native American wampum belts.
Ironically, period wampum now commands high prices amongst collectors.
The study of the full-history of wampum and how it was taken by devious and greedy European settlers and turned into a means of exchange to cheat native Americans and alter their thinking, should perhaps be mandatory for all financial regulators.
http://www.nativetech.org/wampum/wamphist.htm
What a shame for Barca
ReplyDelete