Monday, November 30, 2015

World Soccer's Financing Secrets Revealed in Leaked Documents

FC Barcelona v Rayo Vallecano - La Liga
The documents also show that the firm owns the global sponsorship rights of Barcelona and Brazil forward Neymar, one of soccer’s most celebrated players.

  • Detailed bank statements from Doyen Sports include Neymar deal
  • Fund in litigation over player trade regulations with FIFA

Leaked documents from one of the biggest firms investing millions in soccer-player futures are providing a glimpse into a secretive -- and now banned -- financing practice for the global sport.

Invisible to even the most avid soccer fans, Doyen Sports Investments and other companies like it have become a critical source of financing for often cash-strapped soccer clubs. These investors pay teams for trading rights to select players, betting that the player’s trade value will rise. If that happens, Doyen realizes a profit when the player moves from one team to the next.

A spokesman for the company verified that the documents, released on Football_Leaks.com, were real, but declined to comment further.

Soccer’s Richest Trades

Accounts for the second half of 2011 reveal the company has been involved in some of soccer’s richest trades and turned a handsome profit. The company invested 25.6 million euros ($27.2 million) for trading rights for seven players, including some of the sport’s most expensive. Doyen spent 10 million euros for a 33.3 percent stake in Colombian striker Radamel Falcao’s trading rights. When he was traded two years later, the company netted a 4 million euro profit.

The documents also show that the firm paid 6 million euros in August 2012 to buy the global sponsorship rights of Barcelona and Brazil forward Neymar, one of soccer’s most celebrated players. It also loaned 6.9 million euros to two Spanish teams, Atletico Madrid and Sporting de Gijon.

FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, last year banned investors from buying stakes in future trading rights of players, the biggest part of Doyen’s business. The practice -- called third-party ownership -- started in South America and has spread to large parts of Europe, raising concerns about investors influence over the sport. Doyen has challenged the ban in court.

Ties to Malta

The documents also reveal the source of the company’s funding to be two entities that share an address with Doyen Sports in Ta’Xbiex, a little town in Malta.

One of the companies, Benington Group Assets Limited, has a single shareholder, Malik Ali, a Turkish citizen in his early 30s. Ali, who loaned more than 54 million euros to Doyen, according to one of the documents, also owns all of Doyen’s Class A shares. The remaining 20 percent of its stock is in Class B shares, owned by another Maltese entity called Wood, Gibbins & Partners Limited.

Doyen Sports is owned by Doyen Group Ltd., a London-based firm that invests in commodities, construction, the energy sector, and real estate. It also owns the five-star hotel chain, Rixos Hotels.

The leak comes at a sensitive time for Doyen. It’s awaiting the result of a lawsuit at the Court of Arbitration for Sport after Portugal’s Sporting Clube refused to pay the fund profits it was due over the trade of Argentine defender Marcos Rojo to Manchester United. Sporting claims the contract with Doyen is abusive.

The exact size of Doyen is unknown but Chief Executive Officer Nelio Lucas said in 2014 that the company turns over considerable amounts cash, though it remains small compared with the parent company.

“The group is backed from private families,” he said. “It’s very clear we have so many investments in so many things. So many billions in turnover. So 100 million it’s a little drop in the ocean. Now 200 million, that’s two drops in the ocean.”


Friday, November 20, 2015

The Doomsday Ideology of Islamic State's Leader (BusinessWeek)


  • France escalates air campaign in Raqqa after Paris attacks
  • Baghdadi's propaganda says fighting will lead to apocalypse

An image grab taken from a video released on July 5, 2014 by Al-Furqan Media shows alleged Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi preaching during Friday prayer at a mosque in Mosul.

Ever since Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi put on a black robe and turban to ascend a mosque pulpit in Iraq and proclaim to rule over the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims last year, he’s surrounded himself by symbols of doomsday. 

In addition to his attire, he named the group’s English-language magazine after the Syrian town where some Sunni tradition says Islam’s Armageddon is supposed to happen. Many of his foreign fighters were lured to the self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq by the promise of a ringside seat for the end of the world. 

As the attacks in Paris unite world powers to hit back at Islamic State and reverse its territorial expansion, they also play into that more apocalyptic narrative of the jihadist group and its leader. The slaying of at least 129 people by militants linked to the group, bombings in Beirut and Ankara and the downing of a Russian plane over Egypt show Baghdadi inciting the kind of response that would escalate his war.

“The attacks all work within a strategy of provocation,” said Charlie Winter, who studies Islamic State propaganda and was recently appointed as a senior research associate at Georgia State University.  “They also lend it credibility as a jihadist organization.”          

 Bombing Raqqa

The extremists said the massacre in France was “only the beginning of the storm” and the coalition against them now looks broader and more determined.

Russia and the U.S., previously at cross purposes over Syria’s civil war, are showing signs of responding to French President Francois Hollande’s call for a united front as he steps up a bombing campaign against the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa in eastern Syria. At least 33 Islamic State fighters have been killed in three days in the airstrikes, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“It may want to build a caliphate, but it may also be just fine trying to trigger an apocalyptic war between civilizations,” said Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. 

Mosque’s Messi

Under Baghdadi’s leadership, Islamic State sought to acquire all the trappings of a functional state based in Raqqa, even minting its own coins. Using a slick propaganda machine to help build its brand while funded from extortion and illegal oil, it eclipsed al-Qaeda to turn into the richest and most brutal of terrorist groups. 

Unlike the self-publicity of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, relatively little is known about Baghdadi, whose real name is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. 

He was born into a pious family in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. Neighbors remember him as a shy teenager, according to a profile by William McCants, author of “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.” When he wasn’t in school, he was praying or studying the Koran, earning him the nickname “The Believer.”

At a mosque football club, where Baghdadi was the star, he later became known as “our Messi,” after former world player of the year Lionel Messi of Argentina and Barcelona. Teammates recall he often lost his temper when he failed to score, McCants says.

The Caliph

After the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, Baghdadi helped found an insurgent group and spent time in the American-run detention facility Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. He then joined an al-Qaeda-led umbrella organization of Sunni jihadist groups that went through several incarnations before morphing into Islamic State.

While consolidating his position within the group, Baghdadi pursued a doctorate in religious studies. Islamic State unveiled him as “Caliph Ibrahim” in June 2014 after its fighters swept through northern Iraq and raised their black banners over Mosul.

While skillful at welding together a group from different factions, the question is whether he can meet meet the expectations of his followers, said Matthew Levitt, director of the counter terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
 
“Whenever you have an apocalyptic type cult in any religion, the more time that passes without fulfilling the prophecies, the more evident it becomes that the prophecies aren’t going to happen,” said Levitt.

Baghdadi is reported to wear a mask in the company of anyone who’s not part of a select group of devotees. The appearance at the mosque in Mosul has so far also been his only one. That day, his black turban invoked the image of some Abbasidi rulers who prophesied the world’s end as they seized power in eighth-century Baghdad.

“There’s an attractiveness to a certain type of person, to this way of saying ‘hey, let’s go fulfill this, it’s our time now,”’ said Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical analysis at Stratfor based in Austin, Texas. “That apocalypticism has a lot of appeal.”


Thursday, November 19, 2015

Windows turns 30


The PC revolution started off life 30 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.

Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0 you picked up a mouse and moved windows around by pointing and clicking. Alongside the original Macintosh, the mouse completely changed the way consumers interacted with computers. At the time, many complained that Windows 1.0 focused far too much on mouse interaction instead of keyboard commands. Microsoft's first version of Windows might not have been well received, but it kick-started a battle between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft to provide computing to the masses.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with a boxed copy of Windows 

Back in 1985, Windows 1.0 required two floppy disks, 256 kilobytes of memory, and a graphics card. If you wanted to run multiple programs, then you needed a PC with a hard disk and 512 kilobytes of memory. You wouldn't be able to run anything with just 256 kilobytes of memory with modern machines, but those basic specifications were just the beginning. While Apple had been ahead in producing mouse-driven GUIs at the time, it remained focused on the combination of hardware and software. Microsoft had already created its low-cost PC DOS operating system for IBM PCs, and was firmly positioned as a software company.


With Windows 1.0, Microsoft took the important step of focusing on apps and core software. IBM held onto the fundamentals of the PC architecture for a few years, but Microsoft made it easy for rivals and software developers to create apps, ensuring that Windows was relatively open and easy to reconfigure and tweak. PC manufacturers flocked to Windows, and the operating system attracted support from important software companies. This approach to providing software for hardware partners to sell their own machines created a huge platform for Microsoft. It's a platform that allows you to upgrade through every version of Windows, as a classic YouTube clip demonstrates.

https://youtu.be/vPnehDhGa14  


Windows has now dominated personal computing for 30 years, and no amount of Mac vs. PC campaigns have come close to changing that, but they've certainly been entertaining. Microsoft has continued to tweak Windows and create new uses for it across devices, in businesses, and now with the move to the cloud. It's only now, with the popularity of modern smartphones and tablets, that Windows faces its toughest challenge yet. Microsoft may yet weather its mobile storm, but it will only do so by rekindling its roots as a true software company. In 2045, it's unlikely that we'll be celebrating another 30 years of Windows in quite the same fashion, so let's look back at how Microsoft's operating system has changed since its humble beginnings.











Wednesday, November 18, 2015

EN MI OPINION: (Ricardo Tribin Acosta)

Los hábitos son como los corchos

Como corchos? Pregunta el “maese” Erasmo. Si como tales, ya que ellos tienden a mantenerte arriba o a hundirte. Y es que hay alguna diferencia?, agrega el orate Gaudencio; si, y esta es bastante simple. Un hábito bueno, como por ejemplo el del ejercicio ayuda bastante, levanta el ánimo, y mantiene el espíritu en alto.


Y entonces? agregaría, Venancio. También, algo simple de decir,  más dificultoso a veces de mantener,  y esto es que un mal hábito, como por ejemplo el de la murmuración, conduce a estados con consecuencias insospechadas. Bueno, pero  sería entonces saber cuál es el camino más indicado a seguir?


También muy sencillo en expresión pero que, para practicarlo, necesita una decidida acción. Y cuál sería? Buena y oportuna pregunta. Para mejorar hay que cambiar hábitos, los malos por otros buenos, implicando ello una renovación mental, espiritual, y de actitud, la que nos conducirá hacia una el logro más aceptable calidad de vida.


Miami, Noviembre 18 de 2015




Monday, November 16, 2015

Inside a $5.7 Billion Antitrust Trainwreck (BusinessWeek)

MasterCard’s record settlement with merchants is unraveling after one of its lawyers was found secretly communing with the other side

Keila Ravelo and her husband, Melvin Feliz, were asleep in their prairie-style home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., three days before Christmas 2014 when 20 federal agents charged through the front door with guns drawn. The show of force met no resistance. Ravelo and Feliz submitted to being handcuffed and were driven away in unmarked government sedans.

Ravelo, 50, had never been arrested before. A partner with the elite New York corporate law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, she’d built a successful career as a litigator, primarily representing MasterCard against waves of price-fixing lawsuits filed by retailers. In one credit card case, she helped negotiate a $5.7 billion truce—the largest settlement of an antitrust class action in the world. Earning more than $2 million a year, she favored Hermès handbags and diamond jewelry. She owned a Bentley Continental Flying Spur sedan and sent her teenage sons to a high-priced boarding school in Florida. Feliz, 49, had a varied past that included stints in real estate, paralegal work, and narcotics trafficking.

Husband and wife were taken to federal court in Newark and formally charged with a series of peculiar felonies. Prosecutors alleged that for years Ravelo and Feliz had ripped off her law firm and MasterCard in an $8 million scheme whereby Feliz provided phony back-office services. The crimes carry potential prison terms of more than 10 years. And there was another surprise.

After federal prosecutors subpoenaed Willkie, looking for evidence of the phony-vendor scheme, Ravelo’s colleagues went through her e-mails and discovered she’d been secretly and inappropriately communicating with the enemy: a plaintiffs’ lawyer named Gary Friedman who was suing MasterCard and other major credit card companies on behalf of thousands of retail stores. Concerned about conflicts of interest, Ravelo’s firm decided to disclose the communication publicly. By mid-2015 the Friedman-Ravelo e-mails threatened to undermine the $5.7 billion settlement against MasterCard and Visa. In August a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., rejected a parallel settlement involving American Express, citing the e-mails to Ravelo, at least two of which Friedman marked “Burn after reading.”

It turns out that Ravelo and Friedman had known each other for a quarter-century—since they met as young attorneys representing none other than Melvin Feliz, who’d been convicted on cocaine charges. Ravelo fell for her client, a fellow immigrant from the Dominican Republic who convinced her he’d change his ways. Feliz declined via an attorney to comment. In an exclusive interview, Ravelo says she was fooled long ago, and is now paying the price. “Love,” she says, with resignation in her voice, “gives you rose-colored glasses.”

Ravelo’s story has a can’t-make-this-stuff-up quality: She rose from working-class beginnings in the Caribbean, put herself through law school at Columbia, and reached the highest level of the legal profession, only to get tripped up by scandal. The tale illustrates the strange vicissitudes of greed (prosecutors’ version), the power of romance to cloud common sense (Ravelo’s version), or some combination of the two (perhaps the most likely version). “I still can’t believe how it all unfolded,” says Friedman, who now has career troubles of his own.

Beyond its personal dimensions, the account pulls back the curtain on mass litigation, a process with more line-blurring than is typically revealed in court. Defending herself against criminal fraud charges, of which she says she’s not guilty, Ravelo unmistakably threatens to implicate other lawyers in what she says are the seamy aspects of class-action settlement negotiations. “If I have to show the ugly side to prove my defense,” she says, “that’s what I’ll do.”

Ravelo

Small in stature, Ravelo has large eyes and a gleaming white smile. Former colleagues and opponents, many of whom demanded anonymity because of the controversy engulfing her, describe her as a feisty attorney who scuffled over issues large and small. No one doubted her fealty to clients; her competitiveness with fellow attorneys, however, frequently exceeded her congeniality.

Growing up in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, Ravelo attended private schools, even though she says her parents struggled to house and feed their five children. Around age 11 she gained fluency in English during an 18-month stay with relatives in New York City. She returned to New York at 17, determined to attend college in the U.S.

Ravelo worked as a supermarket cashier, saved money while applying for a green card, and eventually enrolled at Upsala College, a now-defunct liberal arts school in northern New Jersey. She played on the volleyball team and studied hard. Her ambition and intelligence carried her to law school at Columbia, from which she graduated in 1991. She went straight to work in the New York office of Sidley Austin, a prestigious Chicago-based corporate firm. Ravelo recounts her progression with understandable pride. Unlike some of her legal contemporaries, she says, “nothing was handed to me.”

At Sidley, she met Friedman, a more senior associate, while handling a pro bono case on behalf of three convicted Dominican American cocaine dealers. The trio, small-time street sellers, claimed in a civil suit against the federal government that they’d suffered severe beatings by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents. “Gary latched onto me because of the shared Dominican background and my Spanish-language skills,” Ravelo says. “He liked my energy”—an assessment Friedman confirms. Sitting at the civil trial as “second chair” for the plaintiffs, she grew enamored of Feliz. “We both had family in the Bronx,” she says. “He felt like family.”

Feliz came from a middle-class Dominican clan; for high school, his parents had sent him to the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. He told Ravelo he got caught up in drug dealing as a 19-year-old and regretted it, she says. “I was putting a picture together in my head, and I believed it—that the crime is not what defined him.” A New York jury didn’t buy the civil suit against the DEA, and Feliz headed off to prison on the cocaine charge.

Feliz
During three years behind bars, Feliz obtained a community college degree and promised Ravelo he’d learned his lesson. In 1995 he got out, and they married. The following year they moved from the Bronx to tony Englewood Cliffs. Feliz, who’d become something of a jailhouse lawyer helping other inmates with their appeals, took a job with Friedman as a paralegal. “He worked hard and had big goals to start a business of his own,” says Friedman, who’d formed a small private practice. Friedman and his wife, a law professor in New York, socialized with Feliz and Ravelo. “We loved Mel and Keila,” he says.

Ravelo’s legal career took off as she moved from Sidley to another well-established firm, Rogers & Wells, where she won a coveted partnership based not on her courtroom genius but her tireless management of behind-the-scenes discovery, according to several lawyers familiar with her work. Like most large-firm litigators, she rarely appeared before juries or even argued motions to judges. Instead, she took and defended pretrial depositions and wrangled over voluminous document exchanges. She earned a reputation not only for meticulously preparing “depo” witnesses but also for jousting tenaciously over even the most peripheral procedural matters.

Ravelo didn’t include her husband in socializing related to work, with the exception of the Friedmans. “His past was going to be a problem with my colleagues,” she says. “While I was able to figure out he was a good guy, I didn’t think that other people in my professional world would be able to avoid being judgmental and critical.”

She’s probably correct. In the late 1990s, Feliz went back to prison for eight months on a perjury conviction related to his testimony during the civil suit against the DEA. “It was horrific,” Ravelo recalls. “This is not the sort of thing you see at big corporate law firms.”

For her part, Ravelo flourished, largely because of her antitrust work for MasterCard, a company besieged by allegations it conspired with banks that issue cards and rival card networks to fix interchange fees, also known as swipe fees, that are charged to merchants for the privilege of using plastic. Overlapping suits filed by thousands of large and small retailers also alleged that the card networks and banks unlawfully prevented retailers from using surcharges to discourage consumers from using more expensive cards.

“It was horrific. This is not the sort of thing you see at big corporate law firms” 

Ravelo says her loyalty to MasterCard went beyond legalities: “I loved the client. I believed we were right. I lived it day and night.” She became a regular presence at MasterCard’s headquarters in Purchase, N.Y., and a confidante of the company’s top in-house lawyer, Noah Hanft, who controlled tens of millions of dollars in annual legal spending. (Hanft declined to comment.)

In 2005 the Richmond (Va.)-based firm of Hunton & Williams recruited Ravelo to join a growing antitrust department, and, in a reflection of her growing influence, she brought MasterCard along as a client. At this point, with Feliz about five years out of prison, Ravelo says her husband’s career interests began to intersect with her own. Feliz and his brother and sister-in-law had started a small document-copying business catering to lawyers, she says. As digital-document management replaced the reproduction and storage of physical paperwork, Feliz saw an opportunity to expand into the e-document marketplace. “I could help him jump-start that business because of my role in big-time cases,” Ravelo says.

It didn’t occur to her, she adds, that it might be considered inappropriate self-dealing for her to steer MasterCard-related document work to her husband’s nascent company. “At the big law firms, we did favors all the time for clients, arranging summer jobs for their relatives, that kind of thing,” Ravelo says. “I didn’t see any problem with helping Mel.” 

Ravelo and Feliz lived large in Englewood Cliffs, an exclusive enclave north of the George Washington Bridge above the Palisades on the Hudson River. In 2006 they paid almost $2.4 million for the spacious house and manicured yard. In October 2010, Willkie announced it had recruited Ravelo away from Hunton & Williams and was also bringing over several more-junior attorneys who worked with her on the MasterCard litigation.

The move to Willkie represented another step up in terms of prestige. With roots in the late 19th century, the law firm has forgone the industry trend toward gigantism in favor of partner profitability. It has 650 lawyers in nine offices in six countries and represents a wide spectrum of businesses, including Bloomberg LP, owner of this magazine. In 2014, Willkie had revenue of $640 million, ranking 64th in American Lawyer’s Global 100 list and representing an impressive 14.5 percent gain from 2013. In terms of average annual profit per partner, Willkie came in 15th, with $2.6 million.

In addition to the standard law firm news release, Ravelo’s joining Willkie merited coverage in the legal trade press. “Two weeks into the job,” the newsletter Legal Bisnow reported, she “tells us that having a Buddha on her shelf reminds her to keep calm, take a deep breath, and focus inside.”

Ravelo continued to show interest in at least certain outward attachments. In the wake of the real estate crash in South Florida, she and Feliz invested $1.6 million in 2010 to buy two waterside condos in Miami, which they intended to flip for a gain, according to the Real Deal, a real estate publication. In November 2013, Ravelo found time to pose for New Jersey social and celebrity publication (201) Magazine. The caption described her as wearing diamond jewelry from Mary Tacorian, a belted Max Mara dress, and Manolo Blahnik pumps while carrying an Hermès handbag from Paris. “I don’t chase trends,” she told the site. “I like classic styles.”

The same year, NBC News in New York included Ravelo in a segment on parents who spend heavily on their kids’ sports aspirations. The television network estimated that she and Feliz spent $70,000 a year on each of their two sons, who attended a baseball boarding school in Florida run by the talent agency IMG. The parents also bought a house in Bradenton near the IMG Academy. “It’s a lot. It’s a big sacrifice,” Ravelo told NBC.

Politically, Ravelo leans left. She served on the board of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, a New York group that helps low-income families. From 2008 to 2014 she donated more than $500,000 to Democratic candidates and causes, according to Sunlight Foundation, which tracks political contributions. As a black woman, Ravelo remained a rarity at the upper elevations of corporate law. The June 2014 issue of American Lawyer—sporting the cover language “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”—featured her as one of only three black partners out of 131 attorneys recognized by the periodical’s “Big Deals” and “Big Suits” columns over the previous year. On a more upbeat note, the October 2014 edition of Profiles in Diversity Journal included a photo of Ravelo with her arm around a smiling Michelle Obama.

Feliz, meanwhile, was augmenting his document-management business with other pursuits. According to court documents, the DEA received a tip in October 2012 that he and two other men planned to buy 20 kilos of cocaine for $550,000, truck the haul from California to New Jersey, and sell it on the East Coast. On Oct. 22, agents observed Feliz drive up to his Englewood Cliffs house in a black Porsche Cayenne and transfer a satchel of cash from the rear hatch to the car of one of his confederates, who drove to a nearby restaurant and unwittingly delivered it to a DEA informant posing as a courier. The informant transported the money to Los Angeles, where he turned it over to Feliz’s accomplice, at which point the conspirators were arrested and charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine.

Curious about where the $550,000 in front money had come from, the DEA brought in the IRS, and together the agencies came across the family-run document-services operation, which did business under the names E-Lit and Litigation Solutions. The IRS alleged that Feliz started the supposed vendors in 2008 and had a cousin open a bank account for the businesses in Las Vegas. In New York, Feliz maintained a business address at 110 Wall St. that was little more than a mail drop.

From 2008 through mid-2010, Feliz collected payments from Hunton & Williams, and thereafter from Willkie, investigators concluded. The payments were tied to scut work supposedly done for MasterCard: digitizing and indexing paper documents, burning CDs, and the like. Ravelo allegedly approved most of the outlays.

She says in the interview that as far as she knew, Litigation Solutions “was real. I didn’t want to be involved in the day-to-day operation, but Mel was. I said I would make the referral to my people [at Hunton & Williams and later, Willkie] to try them out.”

At that point in the conversation, Ravelo’s criminal defense attorney, Steve Sadow, interrupts, saying: “That’s far enough for now.”

According to the criminal complaint that led to Ravelo’s and Feliz’s arrests the morning of Dec. 22, 2014, the couple operated the phony vendors jointly and did little or no real work for either of Ravelo’s law firms or MasterCard. Prosecutors alleged that the two funneled most of the fraudulently obtained funds into a joint bank account used to pay personal expenses, including “$250,000 in payments to a jewelry store.”

A subpoena from federal prosecutors landed at Willkie’s midtown Manhattan headquarters in November 2014. Within days the law firm asked Ravelo to resign and launched an internal investigation into what she’d been up to with her husband. Willkie, its spokeswoman, and its outside attorney didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Another part of the settlement—one that customers would feel—allowed merchants to impose surcharges on shoppers paying with credit cards to recoup swipe fees 

In early February 2015, Feliz pleaded guilty to the cross-country drug conspiracy, and a few days later, Willkie went public with what it had discovered during its internal probe of Ravelo. The law firm disclosed that her old friend Friedman had sent Ravelo a stream of e-mail over the years, some of which concerned mundane personal matters like joint family vacations.

But some of the e-mail revealed confidential information belonging to merchants Friedman represented who were suing Ravelo’s client, MasterCard, as well as its rivals Visa and American Express. This mattered because a decade of hard-fought litigation had only recently come to a head in interlocking settlements, one involving MasterCard and Visa, and the other, American Express. The MasterCard/Visa pact, preliminarily approved by a federal judge in 2012, provided for $7.25 billion in damages. Major chain stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot were dissatisfied with the settlement, especially with the future liability protection it provided to the card companies, so they dropped out of the case. These “opt-outs” reduced the value of the pact to $5.7 billion. Another part of the MasterCard/Visa settlement—one that customers would feel—allowed merchants to impose surcharges on shoppers paying with credit cards as a way to recoup swipe fees. A “level playing field” provision required any surcharges be consistent for all cards, a rule imposed by the AmEx settlement as well.

The large retailers that had objected seized on the Friedman-Ravelo back-channel communication as another reason the settlements ought to be blown up and litigation reinitiated. Lawyers for the major chains had long contended that attorneys for the settling class of smaller merchants had suspiciously sold out for too little. Now, they added that perhaps the relationship between Friedman and Ravelo explained why and how the supposed sellout had occurred.

Friedman
At a freewheeling hearing in federal court in Brooklyn on Feb. 26, Steig Olson, an attorney for Home Depot, suggested that “one worst-case scenario could be that there was a romantic relationship” between Friedman and Ravelo, which compromised their respective clients’ interests. “Ms. Ravelo’s husband has been indicted not only for the scheme that was mentioned here”—the phony-vendor caper—“but for being a narcotics trafficker,” Olson added. “We don’t know if that had anything to do with this.”

Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University Law School who represented Friedman, refuted Olson’s unsubstantiated suggestions. “This is a long-standing friendship,” Issacharoff said. “The families know each other. T

he kids know each other.” He decried what he called “promiscuous character insinuation.”
In separate interviews, Friedman and Ravelo deny any romantic tie. Friedman hasn’t been implicated in the criminal allegations against Ravelo and her husband.

In a written statement, Friedman characterized his communications with Ravelo as routine back-and-forth intended to test out his legal theories. “I acted as I did based upon a verifiably accurate assessment that our communications would benefit [my clients],” Friedman said. “My internal compass is guided entirely by class member interests. … This work entailed no shortage of sidebars, and it required relationships of trust between individual lawyers in opposing camps.”

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis took a darker view. In August 2015 he rejected the AmEx settlement that permitted merchants to impose a surcharge on customers who use American Express cards as long as the same surcharge applies to consumers using other cards. Garaufis expressed outrage over Friedman’s contacts with Ravelo. (The rejected AmEx settlement would have generated $75 million in fees for Friedman and other plaintiffs’ attorneys, but no money damages for their clients.) The judge noted that Friedman had shown Ravelo large swathes of his confidential case file, including strategy memos drafted by plaintiffs’ lawyers. “Whatever his reason for doing so,” Garaufis wrote, “Friedman’s bringing MasterCard’s counsel into the negotiating process created a conflict between class members and class counsel, and specifically a risk that Friedman, with Ravelo in his ear, negotiated settlement terms that are worse for class members than the terms he might have negotiated absent that conflict.” (Friedman, who disputes Garaufis at every turn, now faces potential civil sanctions for violating a judicial order.)

If the Friedman-Ravelo chatter doomed the AmEx pact, the objecting giant retail chains argued, it ought to have the same effect on the MasterCard/Visa settlement. In trying to salvage the latter deal, Willkie and MasterCard’s other lead law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, have tried to play down Ravelo’s role. The law firms have said in court filings that while Ravelo led Willkie’s MasterCard team, Paul Weiss attorneys set overall strategy and argued key motions in court.

“That is ridiculous,” Ravelo says. “I was in every meeting, I was on every conference call, and I sat at counsel table in court.”

What’s more, Ravelo says that while helping craft MasterCard’s strategy, she relied on Friedman’s revelations of confidential plaintiffs’ information. “When advising MasterCard and communicating with co-counsel … including regarding the negotiation and finalization of the settlement and in connection with mediation sessions, I drew upon all the information in my possession that affected MasterCard’s interests, including the information I was provided by Gary Friedman,” Ravelo said in a sworn declaration dated Sept. 1. In other words, she claims she used confidences revealed to her by Friedman to try to get a better deal for MasterCard.

If her account is true, the $5.7 billion settlement seems doomed: The plaintiff-retailers’ interests were revealed to—and used against them by—a longtime antagonist. The two Willkie partners who worked most closely with Ravelo—Wesley Powell and Matthew Freimuth—didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls seeking comment. They haven’t been accused of wrongdoing. Spokesmen for MasterCard likewise didn’t respond. A person designated to speak for the credit card legal team, but only on the condition of anonymity, calls Ravelo’s assertions false. The negotiations and settlement were proper in all respects but for the behavior of Ravelo and Friedman, this person says.

On Aug. 25, Feliz complicated Ravelo’s position by pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and tax evasion in the faux-vendor case. Feliz, who remains incarcerated, awaits sentencing on the fraud and cross-country cocaine charges. Under his pair of plea deals, he faces 14 years in federal prison. According to Ravelo, Feliz deceived her for more than a decade. Unbeknown to her, she says, he even maintained a secret second family. Ravelo’s attorney, Sadow, wrote in a press release that Ravelo wasn’t a willing accomplice but “acted as Feliz coercively demanded—not freely, voluntarily, or with criminal intent.” Feliz, according to Sadow, “caved to the intense and overwhelming government pressure to implicate Ms. Ravelo.” In an interview, the attorney acknowledges that Ravelo generally is a strong-willed person but says she nevertheless succumbed to “emotional and mental” pressure from her now-estranged husband.

If the coercion defense doesn’t work, Ravelo and Sadow threaten to try a more explosive strategy to foster reasonable doubt about the vendor-fraud case. It’s a long shot but one that could cast unfavorable light on the world of class-action settlement negotiations.

Ravelo suggests she could become a witness in an investigation into whether the MasterCard/Visa settlement talks included unsavory and possibly illegal conduct entirely separate from the fake-vendor business. She says, for example, that she and other credit card lawyers and a court-appointed mediator employed what they called a cram-down strategy, playing stores off each other—smaller stores that cared a great deal about the amount of the swipe-fee recovery vs. pharmacy chains that cared less because they were large enough to negotiate independent terms with the card networks. The defendants worked out a deal with the drugstore chains and then “crammed it down” on the rest of the class on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, Ravelo says.

Although class-action defendants routinely try to divide and conquer groups of plaintiffs, proof of a cram-down, as Ravelo describes it, might raise new questions about the fairness of the $5.7 billion settlement. The person familiar with the credit card legal team confirms that something approximating a cram-down strategy came into play but says no retailers were exploited. The federal judge supervising the process was well aware of how the negotiations unfolded, this person adds.

On another issue, Ravelo says she’s ready to provide evidence that MasterCard and Visa allegedly used private joint defense-strategy sessions to engage in fresh collusion on rates charged to retailers. She says some plaintiffs’ lawyers became aware of this alleged collusive activity, but defense lawyers talked them out of publicizing it in the interest of reaching a large settlement.

Of the fresh collusion allegations, the person designated to speak for the credit card legal team says the judge approved of the defendants working together. Indeed, in a brief order issued on May 20, 2011, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein brushed aside suggestions by certain plaintiffs that defendants colluded illegally on rates as part of their strategy sessions.

Would federal prosecutors delve into this issue, relying on Ravelo as their turncoat witness? A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice declines to comment. Negotiations over a potential criminal plea deal that would reduce Ravelo’s prison term to the realm of several years so far haven’t borne fruit. On Nov. 5 a federal grand jury indicted Ravelo on fraud and tax-evasion charges related to the phony-vendor scheme. Under the indictment, Ravelo faces up to 25 years in prison.

If Ravelo does go to trial, she threatens to expose other damning practices in high-stakes litigation. The collateral damage to former clients and colleagues appears to be of little concern to her as the likely-to-be-disbarred attorney seeks to avoid a future behind bars. “People don’t know the whole story,” she says. “I’ll tell it because I have to—my life and my children’s lives depend on it.”


Thursday, November 12, 2015

EN MI OPINION (Ricardo Tribín Acosta)

Sipote chisme, no j…

Alguien afirma con clara percepción que una de las fuerzas más destructivas de la naturaleza es el chisme o mejor su figura universal, el chismorreo, acudiendo en esta ocasión a relievar el acto con el termino “sipote” tan utilizado en la costa colombiana para relievar con aclamación un hecho que por su incidencia llama la atención.


Oye, compae…ven pa’ca que te tengo ‘sipote” crónica. Que pasó “hegmano”?, le replica el otro, con un notorio acento de los antiguamente llamados en Colombia “turcos”. Pues esta noche debuta como cantante la señora del corregidor. Pues como asi??? Y eso que tiene de raro,  si ella ha estado de “buta” toda su vida.


Así pues, el chisme al nacer se vuelve tan viral que ataca y se propaga haciendo estragos por doquier, basado en historias ficticias o reales, que no ameritan ser difundidas con tanta sevicia pero que, en unos casos solamente y por el desagradable oficio de “chismear”, es demasiado el daño que se le ocasiona a los afectados con el maledicente rumor.


De lo anterior resulta pertinente concluir que es mejor no juzgar para no ser juzgados, recordando con frecuencia el refrán que dice que “en boca cerrada no entran moscas”, lo cual sería quizás el mejor de los métodos para prevenir la práctica tan dañina y tenebrosa que generan los chismes.



Miami, Noviembre 12 de 2015

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

E N M I O P I N I O N (Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta)

Infundir seguridad al saludar

Estreche siempre la mano con firmeza y mire a la gente a los ojos, de forma tal que el saludo implique seguridad en sí mismo y a la vez le brinde algo similar al proceso del encuentro entre dos personas. Esto es simple, pero para no pocos parece a veces que sea una tarea de titanes por factores derivados de la timidez o el nerviosismo.

El asunto es digno de análisis para entender el porqué de esta clase de acción a recomendar. Mi madre me decía que no confiara en aquellos que, cuando me saludaban, o me hablaban bajaban su cabeza, o la desviaban hacia un lado para evitar el contacto visual. Hoy creo en ello puesto que, quien nada debe, nada teme, y por tanto es importante que mantengamos la frente arriba con valor civil y sin ningún asomo de falsa arrogancia o prepotencia.  

Lo anterior se aplica en los saludos y en los diálogos y no tanto así cuando se presenta la perspectiva de un conflicto, momentos en los cuales, si la otra persona se encuentra desaforada, lo mejor será, hasta donde sea posible, evitar el contacto visual ya que el hacerlo podría precipitar un aumento en su agresividad. 

Ello no implica que cuando tengamos que enfrentar algo que se convierta en una amenaza, el mantener de nuevo la frente en alto indicará la presencia del valor y la ausencia de cualquier perspectiva de cobardía pues, como dice el famoso refrán “Es mejor morir de pie que vivir arrodillados”.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com 

Miami, Octubre 22 de 2015
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El silencio y su devenir

Algunos dicen que a veces el silencio es la mejor respuesta, cuando cualquier cosa que se agregue quizás traería energías no tan buenas como las que en realidad necesitamos, así como también es bueno recordar que es mejor ser feliz que poseer la razón, pues esto en algunos y no necesariamente en todos los casos podría ser un camino transaccional a escoger.
 
Pero, dirán otros, me quedo entonces quieto cuando quizás mi acción ayude a la resolución de conflictos?. No necesariamente, sería la mejor respuesta, puesto que allí en vez de conciliar lo que se haría es bobear, confundiéndose en tal caso la tolerancia con la "pendejancia".
 
El mejor termómetro por tanto, acerca de una determinada situación, será entonces el del quizás, el menos común de los sentidos, esto es el sentido común, el que si sabemos aplicar adecuadamente en nuestros procesos decisorios, con seguridad expresa generará mejores resultados, que si no lo aplicamos.
 

Miami, Octubre 29 de 2015

Monday, November 9, 2015

The Netflix Effect: More Streaming Means Better Shows (BusinessWeek)

Internet video economics will increasingly favor original, higher-value productions.
Kathleen Grace speaks at Stream Con NYC on Oct. 30 in New York.
Kathleen Grace speaks at Stream Con NYC on Oct. 30 in New York. 

Kathleen Grace has done pretty well for herself in 2015. In June her production company, New Form Digital, posted a pilot on YouTube for Single by 30, a show about two teenagers who promise to marry each other if they wind up unattached at that unfathomable age. When YouTube announced its paid subscription service, YouTube Red, in late October, Single by 30 was on the list of its 10 exclusive original series and movies. A month earlier, Verizon had locked up the rights to six other New Form Digital shows for its Go90 mobile video app, including #DoOver, about a woman who has to keep reliving her disastrous 25th-birthday party, and Mr. Student Body President, whose teen protagonist is billed as a cross between Ferris Bueller and Frank Underwood. In the past year, Grace has sold 18 shows to 10 digital video services.

The market has grown a lot since Grace began running her production company in the spring of 2014. 

“At that moment, the market didn’t exist,” she says. Since then, a series of big-name companies such as YouTube and Verizon has been pouring money into digital-video offerings, most trying to differentiate themselves with shows or movies that can’t be found elsewhere. Because many of them are asking customers to pay, rather than have them only watch ads, those companies have to work that much harder to draw in viewers. Digital-video producers, especially those focused on programming for smartphones, are enjoying something they didn’t have a few years ago: a seller’s market.

Call it the Netflix effect. The streaming leader’s steady push into original shows and movies has forced rivals such as Amazon.com and Hulu to do the same. Netflix is running about two dozen original series, including comedies, dramas, and cartoons, and it has slated 30 more for the coming year, plus a steady stream of original documentaries, standup comedy specials, and the occasional feature film. Transparent put Amazon on the map. Hulu produced seven half-hour comedy series this year; it’s also ordered dramas, including a miniseries based on Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63. The new competitors, including YouTube Red and Go90, have learned the lesson. Exclusivity “has worked effectively for Netflix,” says Peter Csathy, the chief executive officer of consultant Manatt Digital Media. “Others are trying to accomplish that in the long-form and short-form game.”

Snapchat’s videos are a good example of the shorter model. Formatted for viewing on a smartphone, they come from partners such as BuzzFeed and Comedy Central and prompt viewers to swipe from one brief clip to another unless they opt for a longer segment. (Snapchat recently shuttered a separate effort to produce original material in-house.) Other services are targeting different niches. Refinery29’s short videos focus on women; Vimeo aims for art-house fare. Spotify is developing works that can be played “ambiently”—that is, listened to while your phone’s in your pocket.

YouTube Red’s shows tend to hew more closely to the teen aesthetic of YouTube’s biggest stars. Robert Kyncl, chief business officer, bristles at Netflix comparisons. “Our primary focus of the investment are the people who have risen to fame on YouTube,” he told reporters at the Red launch. “We would very much like that to work, because it would make it very unique. And it addresses the Netflix question, the Hulu question, and any other questions.”

Among the entrants, Verizon appears to be splashing around the most money. It says it’ll have 52 original series on Go90 by the end of the year and has programming deals with about 100 companies. Those include established giants such as Viacom and YouTube-grown video networks like Endemol Beyond. Adrian Sexton, the chief operating officer and president of Endemol, says agreements with Verizon and other companies provide the capital to boost production quality above what Endemol could afford on old-school YouTube, where ad-sharing deals are profitable only for the most viral of videos. For Verizon, upstarts Endemol and New Form Digital remain a cheaper bet than a studio like Fox or Paramount, Sexton says. “The production value is in a nice economic sweet spot,” he says. “You’re talking about spending hundreds of thousands, and not millions, on a series.”

This is different from the traditional YouTube model, where creators don’t generally get advances and are paid through a share of the advertising revenue. That model rewards low-budget productions and punishes anyone who can’t attract a massive number of viewers. Subscription services will lead to new types of content, says George Strompolos, the founder and CEO of Fullscreen, which produces and distributes online video and is launching a subscription service to compete with YouTube Red. “No longer is it strictly this ‘build it yourself and get a revenue share’ model, although that still exists,” he says. “People are buying content in the same way they’d buy a TV show.”

There’s only so much time in the day, even if people do watch YouTube superstar PewDiePie every minute they’re stopped at a red light or in line at the pharmacy. And not every company that wants its own video service will be able to pull it off. Microsoft, Samsung, and Yahoo! have recently shut down online video efforts. Grace, who worked at YouTube for three years before starting New Form Digital, says she’s been successful partly because Silicon Valley’s talent for building video services doesn’t particularly overlap with the skills needed to create compelling programming. Most companies will likely struggle to do both at once, she says, because “the pieces don’t always line up.

Friday, November 6, 2015

Steve Jobs Considered Building an Apple Car in 2008 (BusinessWeek)

The Apple co-founder kicked around ideas with longtime confidant and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell.

Count Steve Jobs among those curious about what an Apple car would look like. In 2008, not too long after the Apple co-founder introduced the iPhone, Jobs was considering the possibilities of a much bigger gadget. Tony Fadell, then a senior vice president at Apple, remembers talking with Jobs about the potential for an iCar.

Jobs and Fadell, who had collaborated on the iPod and iPhone, swapped ideas about car designs on multiple occasions. "We had a couple of walks," Fadell said in an interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang. The pair posed hypothetical questions to each other, such as: "If we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? And what would this be? What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?"

Jobs decided not to move forward at the time. The discussions took place when the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse, and Apple was busy trying to establish the iPhone as a mainstream product. "The Detroit auto industry was almost dead," Fadell made the comments on Bloomberg TV's Studio 1.0, which premieres Wednesday night at 9 p.m. in New York. "It was fun to kick those ideas around."

Since Jobs's death in 2011, Detroit has rebounded, and Apple—not unlike Silicon Valley compatriots Uber and Google parent company Alphabet—has pushed closer than ever to releasing a vehicle. The company has been building a team of hundreds, including engineers and experts in battery and robotics technology, to design a car that could go into production by 2020, people with knowledge of the matter said in February. With more than $200 billion in cash and investments on its balance sheet, Apple certainly has the resources to build a car (and a spaceship).

Tony Fadell, founder and chief executive officer of Nest Labs, speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview in San Francisco.
Tony Fadell, founder and chief executive officer of Nest Labs, speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview in San Francisco

As Fadell points out, phones and cars aren't that different. "A car has batteries; it has a computer; it has a motor; and it has mechanical structure. If you look at an iPhone, it has all the same things. It even has a motor in it," said Fadell, who's now the chief executive officer of Alphabet's Nest home appliances company. "But the hard stuff is really on the connectivity and how cars could be self-driving."

The idea for a car had been bouncing around Apple even before 2008. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, said in 2012 court testimony that executives discussed building a car even before it released the iPhone in 2007. Mickey Drexler, a former Apple board member and head of J.Crew Group, also said in 2012 that Jobs had wanted to build a car.

Jobs, who drove a Mercedes, said "no" to a lot of projects, according to Fadell, who said he doesn't have firsthand knowledge of Apple's car plans. Cameras and televisions were other products the company had considered but ultimately avoided in favor of the iPhone, he said. "At the end of the day, what was the biggest one that had the biggest dramatic impact on the world?" Fadell said. "We said, 'OK, we're going to focus our energy on that. Forget all this other stuff.'"

Years later, the auto industry is still ripe for a tech overhaul. Fadell said it's "early days" in the evolution of the car, especially for mass adoption of electric vehicles. He said Silicon Valley views software as its biggest advantage in a bid to upend the auto industry. "I think you're going to see some dramatic changes in the way we think about these cars and the accessibility in terms of the price points," Fadell said. "But we're still seven to 10 years away from a mass switch-over." When you consider that the iPhone came out eight years ago, a lot can happen in that time.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

SILICON VALLEY MEETS LATIN AMERICA! ... in Miami !

Mobile Growth LATAM 2015
Nov 12th - Nov 13th, 2015
Miami, US

SILICON VALLEY MEETS LATIN AMERICA!


Silicon Valley meets Latin America in Miami to discuss the markets, and trends in mobile user acquisition, growth, and monetization of mobile content, apps and mobile entertainment services.   Network with innovators at the forefront of the mobile industry. Promote your brand among Latinamerican leading game and App developers and studios, brands, operators, ad networks, media agencies and app marketing platforms.



SAVE $500 WITH THE PROMO CODE: SFTA15
NOVEMBER 12th & 13 th - MIAMI
The Lightbox @ Goldman Warehouse

SPEAKERS
VANESSA ROSAS
INNOVATION & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
Televisa
MYLES KLEEGER
CRO
Appboy
CHRISTIAN CALDERON
HEAD OF MARKETING
Dots
.
JUAN MONTOYA
CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER
Rokk3r Labs
ALEJANDRO LOMBANA
COUNTRY MANAGER FOR COLOMBIA, ECUADOR AND VENEZUELA
Gameloft
SCOTT BAUER
DIRECTOR OF USER
ACQUISITION
GSN Games
MARCO BOTERO
HEAD OF LATAM SALES
Twitter
ELAZAR GABAY
ASSOCIATE VP, MOBILE PRODUCTS
AnchorFree
ERIC TOURTEL
SVP LATIN AMERICA
Teads

ANDREAS GROSS
FOUNDING TEAM & HEAD OF GROWTH
Life360
BILL STANTON
SVP, SALES & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Meetme
ALI JAMAL
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT
STRATEGY AND INSIGHTS
Rockyou
DENIZ GEZGIN
STUDIO LEAD
FunPlus
ETHAN SMITH
VP OF GROWTH
Yummly
GIANCARLO MORI
CEO
Movyl Entertainment

LEANDRO GONZÁLEZ
CEO
Trick Gaming Studios LLC
TERRY HSIAO
CEO
Hook Mobile
PERLA SALCEDO
CEO
Innovattia
Silicon Valley meets Latin America in Miami to discuss the markets, and trends in mobile user 
acquisition, growth, and monetization of mobile content, apps and mobile entertainment services.
Network with innovators at the forefront of the mobile industry. 
Promote your brand among Latinamerican leading game and app developers and studios, brands, 
operators, ad networks, media agencies and app marketing platforms.

SAVE $500 WITH THE PROMO CODE: SFTA15