White washing through the vineyards!

Apart from having himself ostentatious driven around in down seized (open roofed) middle class (French) car, showing off a girlfriend in public whilst quarreling with a former and recent presidential candidate, well-educated foremost charming ex-wife, being also the mother of not unsubstantial number of (his!) children. Son Excellence Hollande let it publicly know that the Elysee was too pompous according to his form origin socialist taste.

This taste included the presidential palate as the just new elected president de la Republique decided that the extensively throughout centuries of French presidential grandeur, built up and collected extremely large and well stocked wine cellars should be at least trimmed in size!!

This head butt was in the first place directed to his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy who was known to have made extensive use of the contents of this grand cave which I have been told by well-informed sources is more than a secretively not open to the public viticulture museum par excellence than an entertainment tool to please the passing by foreign diplomats.

A cellar like the one at the Elysee is a cellar for oenologists with an interest in the historical French wine culture.

Just as the whole NSA muddy tsunami is losing its force in the international press I read on the internet that…Watchdogs warn that a few Chinese and Russian investors are hiding bad cash in (French) vineyard sales. It follows up by stating that “France’s anti-money laundering authority has gone public with suspicions that foreigners are using investments in French vineyards to clean dirty money.” The 2012 annual report from the “Traitement du vineyards et action contre les circuits financiers clandestine” (TRACFIN), part of the French Finance Ministry, published earlier this month, calls for increased vigilance in selling French vineyards to foreign investors, singling out Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian buyers.

But (thank the lord!!!; mjsm) the report cautions that most foreign investors are legitimate…..

So what to make of this? The articles and blogs on this subject are more pointing to for these authors hard to define transactions. The Wine Spectator has no international trade investigation unit which for example the Wall Street Journal surely has. I read mostly thought up theories that wealthy Chinese sending money abroad to evade taxes…. In my opinion this has maybe happened but it’s a life threatening exercise to transfer untaxed money out of China to buy a French vineyard of use as trade finance in the wine trade. These transactions can simply be detected sooner or later (why hurry all international transfers are well digitally documented and stored to be called up and to be officially investigated if and when needed) by the Chinese tax authorities, culprits will be prosecuted and they or their family will finish up maybe having to pay for their own bullet used by the firing squad they are likely to face.

Other methods like the Samsonite with cash (rubles) payments at shady French provincial notaries, the French authorities themselves should have taken care of this – obviously sticking out sore thumb – by now. These are nearly medieval practices not any longer possible in the present international bank money transferring systems. This is also a known domain of activity of the US, NSA, this for other obvious reasons besides money laundering.

The argument of, I ready: …so and so.. “wasn’t surprised…what a great investment. It has a certain patina, the kind of thing wealthy people invest in, and an air of intellectualism and high society. And the wine price is not fixed. For trade based money laundering, you can overvalue or undervalue the wine. Money launderers often use false invoices to move cash illicitly.”…what a nice prose, but in essence its nonsense. Wealthy, intellectual, high society etc. are a bunch of people who have real money and have themselves solidly advised and the point brought up hare are known for over decades to the likes of Price Waterhouse, Delloitte and you name them, the even smarter ones the, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynches of this world long ago already forgot this small talk. A fake invoices is retraceable by any tax inspector even as far away as Uganda. The wine price is not fixed….there thousands of international trades goods which have no fixed prices only regulated exchanged traded commodities have daily fixes and there are max around hundreds of these commodities…so why pick out wine in the first place???

What I think of these concocted stories that they are produced to created suspense, confuse readers, shined out intelligence when there is none, give employment to all kind of subsidized governmental departments, create unreal tax money devouring jobs, give reasons to create budgets etc., etc.

IN FACT: with the international present tax inspection and world money transfer systems in place, complemented by correct and just operating bodies like for example the NSA, the French anti money laundering authority has to go back to the drawing board or question its own right of existence.

M.J. San Martin