Wednesday 4 January 2012

Belgian Court rules that 'Herbalife' has been hiding a closed-market swindle

Shyam 
Your free-thinking readers (and particularly, senior Indian police officers and anti-corruption investigators) might be interested to learn that on November 28th, 2011, after 7 years of typical, legalistic/sophistic argument (leading to procedural delay), a Belgian court finally concluded that 'Herbalife International Belgium' has always been the corporate front for a dissimulated pyramid scheme based on the pernicious, self-perpetuating lie that endless-chain recruitment + endless payments by the recruits = endless profits for the recruits. 
In a civil case brought on behalf of the Belgian public by an independent, Belgian consumer protection association, 'Test-Aankoope,' the Belgian commercial tribunal in Brussels, accepted the plaintiff's common-sense arguments, and ordered that 'Herbalife' should be obliged to produce quantifiable evidence which would support its own published claim to be a 'direct selling' company as defined by Belgian law. However, in the end, no such evidence could be produced by 'Herbalife's' Belgian corporate officers or attorneys, because it doesn't exist. The court then ruled that, in the absence of this evidence, although it might have been theoretically possible for 'Herbalife' participants to sell 'Herbalife' products directly to the public for a profit, in practice, the persons whom 'Herbalife' has always arbitrarily defined in its own propaganda as 'direct sellers,' cannot have done this. On the contrary, all active participants in the so-called 'Herbalife MLM income opportunity' can only have been induced to give the Belgian branch of this US-based organization, thousands of dollars annually in exchange for effectively-unsaleable products, on the fraudulent pretext that, by doing this, and by recruiting more and more persons to perpetuate the same hermetic-system of consumption and recruitment, ad infinitum, eventually, all active participants could receive a vast residual income without any further effort.
The Belgian court rejected 'Herbalife's' absurd defence that its 'sales people are retail customers,' or 'consumers' revealing that the racketeers behind 'Herbalife' have maliciously hidden their criminal objectives by falsely describing their victims as 'customers' or 'consumers' in declarations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and to 'Herbalife' shareholders, but, at the same time, the organization has always told its victims that they are 'direct sellers' or 'distributors.'
In plain language, 'Herbalife's' claim to be 'a lawful direct selling company,' was blown out of the water.
Ignoring this common-sense civil lawsuit in Belgium, and ignoring similar common-sense, class-action civil lawsuits filed in the USA (which 'Herbalife's' bosses have been allowed to halt by handing over millions of dollars of stolen cash to the plaintiffs), to date, no US federal law enforcement agency has taken any rigorous action against the billionaire bosses of 'Herbalife' under the US Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 1970. 
David Brear (copyright 2012)

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