Six legitimate women and a Mexican Cleopatra

[doombug]

Some notable quotes from the Forbes' article:

Seventy-eight women make the list [of 793 total billionaires], 10 more than last year, though only 6 are self-made.

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0327/111.html

"[T]here is a lot of effort that goes into creating the illusion of trouble-free travel. Behind the scenes, flight crews, florists, concierges and cooks are constantly scrambling to make sure that everything works seamlessly. The secret is for billionaires or, more likely, one of the many people who work for them, to have the right tools.

[...]

Almost as useful is a little black card, weighing less than an ounce, that lets billionaires do just about anything. Cardholders must be invited to apply for the Centurion Card from American Express, and the company won't say how many cardholders there are or how they are chosen.



"Centurion cardholders travel an average of 25 times per year," says Desiree Fish, an American Express spokeswoman. "They must have an annual spend-level of $250,000 to be considered." Once signed up, subscribers pay an annual fee of $2,500 and have access to a dedicated personal concierge as well as a travel agent, private-jet charter program, chauffeured limo service and international emergency health care. They can also get tickets to "By Invitation Only" events, like seats onstage at a recent Rolling Stones concert, which cost $5,800 per pair.

Are any of these things impossible to achieve through other means? Of course not. The card's real appeal is its exclusivity; it is one of the few amenities that the very wealthy cannot simply buy.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/08/billionaires-luxury-travel-cx_sb_0309feat_ls.html

On a warm, bright morning just outside San José, Costa Rica, Calvin Ayre, slightly hungover, was lounging in his bathrobe at a poolside office in his new $3.5 million, 10,000-square-foot compound. Sipping coffee poured by one of his five servants, the entrepreneur declared, paraphrasing Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “I’m going to win this war without fighting battles. I’ve put a lot of energy into finding ways not to fight my enemies.”



From this tropical oasis, Ayre has dodged and taunted those enemies, the main one being the U.S. Department of Justice. His Bodog Entertainment Group is in the not very kosher business of Web gambling. It takes bets from 16 million customers, most of them in the U.S. And that appears to violate the law--Title 18, Section 1084 of the U.S. Code--which forbids using telephones or other communication devices “in interstate or foreign commerce” in order to take bets. “Online gambling, whether it is located offshore or not, is illegal when it comes to the United States and its citizens,” says a Justice Department official who works on Internet gambling crimes.

[...]

Last year the privately held Bodog handled $7.3 billion in online wagers, triple the volume of 2004. Ayre says all this betting gave him sales of $210 million, and that he took 26% of the revenue to the bottom line. What’s his business worth? Two similar ventures that are publicly traded (in Europe) go for well over 18 times trailing earnings. At that multiple, Bodog, along with other assets, gives Ayre a net worth of at least $1 billion.

Ayre presumably has not just the vice squad but the tax collectors in a huff. While 95% of his sales come from the U.S., the 44-year-old doesn’t pay a nickel in corporate or personal income tax here. Is that legit? Foreigners are supposed to pay federal tax on income derived from U.S. business activities. The suckers are stateside, the electronic roulette wheels and digitized sports pools in Costa Rica. Where’s the action? It remains to be seen whether irs agents could make Ayre pay, assuming they could get their mitts on either him or his money.

[...]

Bodog.com claims 145,000 regulars who bet at least once a week. Their average wager: $60 for sports, $13 for casino games.

[...]

Ayre hasn’t lost his crude touch: He sometimes hands out thong underwear as business cards.

Bodog is based in Costa Rica, where 150 bookmakers and customer service reps guide the action. The government doesn’t charge businesses on money earned from other countries, and since Ayre doesn’t take bets from Costa Ricans, all Bodog revenues come from foreign lands. He pays no personal income taxes in Costa Rica since all his assets--cash, cars, houses and other properties--are in Bodog’s name, not Ayre’s. He says he has $25 million invested in Costa Rican and Canadian real estate and $40 million in Swiss banks.

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0327/112.html

[Roustam] Tariko has amassed an estimated $1.9 billion fortune. The first in Russia to buy a $500,000 Maybach, the 44-year-old also owns The Russian Standard Terrible, a custom-made boat with a 3,500hp motor; a house in Sardinia, purchased from the wife of fellow billionaire and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; and a private Boeing 737 that recently zipped him from Miami, where he rents a 20-room house on Star Island, to his home in Moscow and on to Italy for the Winter Olympics.





Tariko made this fortune, and acquired his toys, by seizing on the insight that even ordinary Russians want a taste of the good life. Just as the nation began to open to the West, Tariko started importing Italian chocolates and liquor. Then, under the banner of Russian Standard Group, he created a brand of his own: the $10 Russian Standard vodka (a lot for most Muscovites). And amid the misery of the 1998 Russian banking crisis he founded Russian Standard Bank, a pioneer in consumer credit that gave millions of his countrymen their first opportunity to buy dishwashers, TVs and refrigerators.

[...]

[He] believed that however poor and devastated his countrymen were, they still craved Western amenities. So he tapped the equity in his consumer business and offered middle-class Russians new products--consumer loans (average size: $400) and credit cards (average outstanding balance: $1,080), at annual interest rates of 40% to 60%.

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0327/128.html

The top 25:

Rank  Name  Citizenship  Age  Net Worth ($bil)  Residence  
1  William Gates III  United States  50  50.0  United States  
2  Warren Buffett  United States  75  42.0  United States  
3  Carlos Slim Helu  Mexico  66  30.0  Mexico  
4  Ingvar Kamprad  Sweden  79  28.0  Switzerland  
5  Lakshmi Mittal  India  55  23.5  United Kingdom  
6  Paul Allen  United States  53  22.0  United States  
7  Bernard Arnault  France  57  21.5  France  
8  Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud  Saudi Arabia  49  20.0  Saudi Arabia  
9  Kenneth Thomson & family  Canada  82  19.6  Canada  
10  Li Ka-shing  Hong Kong  77  18.8  Hong Kong  
11  Roman Abramovich  Russia  39  18.2  United Kingdom  
12  Michael Dell  United States  41  17.1  United States  
13  Karl Albrecht  Germany  86  17.0  Germany  
14  Sheldon Adelson  United States  72  16.1  United States  
15  Liliane Bettencourt  France  83  16.0  France  
15  Lawrence Ellison  United States  61  16.0  United States  
17  Christy Walton  United States  51  15.9  United States  
17  Jim Walton  United States  58  15.9  United States  
19  S Robson Walton  United States  62  15.8  United States  
20  Alice Walton  United States  56  15.7  United States  
21  Helen Walton  United States  86  15.6  United States  
22  Theo Albrecht  Germany  83  15.2  Germany  
23  Amancio Ortega  Spain  70  14.8  Spain  
24  Steven Ballmer  United States  50  13.6  United States  
25  Azim Premji  India  60  13.3  India
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/Worth_1.html?boxes=custom

An article from VDARE.com:

Meet The World’s Third-Richest Man—And The Nine Other Mexican Billionaires
By Allan Wall

Mexico is commonly viewed as a poverty-stricken country whose inhabitants will die unless we open our borders right now. An appeal to the "humanitarian argument" is one of the main propaganda tools used to support open borders and mass immigration.

And by American standards—though not world standards—Mexico is indeed a poor country.

But there is a lot of money down here.

As a matter of fact, according to Forbes magazine’s latest list of billionaires, a Mexican, Carlos Slim, is the third-richest man in the world!

That’s right! Bill Gates is #1 with $50 billion; Warren Buffett is at #2 with $42 billion.

Trailing Buffett by a mere 12 billion is Carlos Slim of Mexico, with a net worth of $30 billion dollars.

Besides Slim, there are nine other Mexican billionaires. (That’s dollar billionaires, not peso billionaires).

Why don’t Americans hear more about these people?

Let’s take a look at each of the 10 Mexican billionaires

CARLOS SLIM HELU

Carlos Slim (see photo here), also known as "Rey Midas" and "El Ingeniero" [the engineer] is a telecommunications magnate, owner of Telmex, America Movil, CompUsa, WorldCom and plenty of other holdings, including Latin American subsidiaries of Verizon. Of Slim’s 30 billion dollar net worth, just last year he accumulated $6 billion of it.

Carlos himself didn’t start out poor. His Lebanese-immigrant family (original surname Salim) became rich buying up Mexico City properties after the Mexican Revolution.

By the time of the much-acclaimed privatization (a.k.a. crony capitalism) policy of the Carlos Salinas administration (1988-1994), Slim was in position to purchase Mexico’s state telephone monopoly, Teléfonos de México—Telmex.

So Telmex was converted from a state monopoly to a private monopoly. It still controls 94 percent of all the fixed telephone lines in Mexico. Slim also has 80 percent of the mobile phone market.

Mexican free-market economist Silvia Luna explains what Telmex offers the Mexican telephone-user:

"Today Mexico faces the highest telephone charges in the Western Hemisphere and Telmex customers pay the highest telephone charge of the 30 countries of the OECD…" [ :shock:  :shock:  :shock: ]

"We Mexicans pay charges three times higher than the cell-phone users of Sweden and Denmark, which negatively affects the country’s competitiveness, while political influences block everyone who promotes competition."

But the world’s third-richest man is still coming out ahead!

JERONIMO ARANGO

Spanish-born Jeronimo Arango is a self-made retailer whose retail chain Cifra partnered with Wal-mart in the early nineties. Later Cifra was bought out by Wal-mart. Arango cashed in, left the company but kept a lot of stock, and is now worth $4.6 billion. There are currently over 700 Wal-marts in Mexico, and last year its stock rose 44 percent. So life is good for the 80-year old Arango.

RICARDO SALINAS PLIEGO

Ricardo Salinas Pliego and family are worth $3.1 billion. Salinas Pliego made most of his money in retail, cellular services, and television—he owns the Azteca Network. (Azteca, formerly state broadcaster Inmevision, was acquired from the Mexican government back in the Salinas privatization days.)

Salinas Pliego has made history by being investigated in Mexico’s first ever insider-trading case. Still pending.

ALBERTO BAILLERES

Alberto Bailleres has expanded his inherited mining interests (and other projects) into a net worth of $2.8 billion. Gropo BAL, the family holding company, includes the Grupo Nacional Provincial bank and Palacio de Hierro, a luxury department store.

MARIA ASUNCIÓN ARAMBURUZABALA



Beer heiress Maria Asunción Aramburuzabala is Mexico’s richest woman. She and her family are worth $2 billion. Her Spanish-immigrant grandfather founded Grupo Modelo, now the country’s biggest brewer. Maria also owns part of Grupo Televisa, but she just sold out half her stocks.

And get this—last year Maria Asuncion married none other than Bush crony Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

This tends to bear out Steve Sailer’s thesis that Bush policy toward Mexico is based on a dynastic desire to emulate the Mexican oligarchs.

ROBERTO HERNANDEZ RAMIREZ

Roberto Hernandez Ramirez, now 64, is a self-made banking and finance magnate. Hernandez’ big break came when he was in charge of the Banamex bank at the time of its purchase by Citigroup in 2001. That deal made Hernandez him almost $2 billion. So now he sits on the Citigroup board along with former U.S. president Gerald Ford. And he reportedly devotes himself to social and environmental causes.

LORENZO ZAMBRANO

Lorenzo Zambrano . . . is the head of Monterrey-based cement firm Cemex, founded by his grandfather. He and his family are worth $1.8 billion. Last year Cemex spent $5.8 billion acquiring British cement firm RMC Group, Zambrano also owns a good chunk of telecom company Axtel. At 62, Zambrano is single and has no children, so I wonder who will inherit his fortune.

EMILIO AZCARRAGA JEAN

Emilio Azcarraga Jean is only 38, but he’s worth $1.7 billion.

Azcarraga inherited media conglomerate Grupo Televisa from his late father and owns almost 15 percent of its outstanding shares.

You might be interested to know that Televisa already owns 11% of U.S. Spanish broadcaster Univision, notorious for its funding of the opposition to California’s Proposition 187.

Azcarraga is planning to become a U.S. citizen so he can increase his share in Univision.

After all, what is American citizenship about if not increasing your market share!

ALFREDO HARP HELU

At only $1.4 billion, Alfredo Harp Helu is a "poor" cousin of Carlos Slim (see above). Harp made his fortune in the Banamex buyout (see Roberto Hernandez above) and also owns the "Red Devils" Mexico City baseball team.

ISAAC SABA RAFFOUL

Self-made Isaac Saba Raffoul and family are worth $1.4 billion, making him the "poorest" Mexican billionaire. (Well, somebody has to be!)

Saba runs pharmaceutical giant Grupo Casa Saba, and has textiles and real estates. He runs Marriott hotels in Puerto Vallarta and Cancun. Even though his CasaMagna resort in Cancun is closed because it was hit by Hurricane Wilma, Saba is not hurting.

SO WHAT?

OK, so Mexico has 10 billionaires (plus plenty of millionaires). Is that bad?

No, not if the billionaires are using their money to invest in businesses that provide jobs for Mexicans. In fact, if they were using their wealth to raise the Mexican standard of living, they would be heroes.

Carlos Slim talks about the importance of economic growth and jobs. He even meets together with a group of other high-rollers, politicians and intellectuals and other elitists to talk about economic development.

That’s about as far as it’s gotten.

I believe that if mass emigration to the U.S. didn’t exist, there would be much more pressure on these billionaires.

President Fox is OBSESSED with emigration. But rather than using his presidential bully pulpit to pressure Slim and his fellow billionaires, Fox has used it to bully the United States into accepting more Mexican immigrants.

Mexico has a huge gap between the rich and the poor, I’ve seen it firsthand where I live. You don’t have to be a Communist or radical egalitarian to see the potential social problems caused by this reality.

If Mexico’s rich were doing more to provide jobs for their fellow citizens, who could begrudge them their wealth? I wouldn’t.

Here is my American strategy. What if the U.S. got control of its borders, deported illegal aliens, refused to give amnesty, eliminated the Anchor Baby loophole, and expelled any Mexican diplomats who meddled in U.S. immigration policy.

What if we drastically reduced legal immigration, and made it clear by our policies that this era of mass immigration is over?

There would be a lot of shouting and whining. But in the end, Mexico would have to accept it.

Then Mexicans would start paying more attention to their fellow citizens who are billionaires and millionaires.

With the U.S. safety valve shut off, Mexico’s masses might start to pressure the government confiscate the wealth of Mexico’s rich…or just take some of it themselves.

Faced with this prospect, I think these Mexican billionaires would start thinking seriously about generating more job opportunities for their fellow citizens.

These billionaires have formidable wealth, assets and connections.

How about using them to create more and better-paying jobs right here in Mexico?

http://www.vdare.com/