Rich Energy Speculation for Posterity

"zipfuel" (zipfuel)
07/12/2019 at 21:25 • Filed to: RICH ENERGY, F1, HAAS F1, CLUSTERFUCK

Who’d have though the car crash at Roman Grosjean’s team would in the sponsor’s tent... Lets make projections so we can say “Told ya so” or “Man I was waay off” when the dust clears

EDIT: Grosjean just crashed in the pitlane during practice - all is back to normal

This mess feels like it’s coming into focus now so heres my hypothesis; presumably in addition to cheating on his tax bill using using fake invoices Gene Haas has run some other more successful maneuvers over the years which have netted him a bunch of tax-free cash offshore (from the Chinese market maybe?).

Now F1 is an expensive hobby and it sure would be nice to use those funds so the money gets funnelled through Rich Energy (numbered company invests in beverage startup doesn’t make news even in the trade press) with the understanding that most of it is channeled into F1 sponsorship (the invoice scam had the accomplice taking a 2% cut).

Rich Energy makes no sense as a conventional money laundering scheme since why would anyone be pissing all their I’ll gotten gains up the (pit)wall whilst drawing the attention of literally millions of people?

I initially wondered if Gene Haas was trying to sneak money out of his company away from the eyes of shareholders who might object but Haas Automation is a wholly owned private company - nobody cares what he does, except the IRS....

A complex set of connections

And they would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their mountain bikes!

Well now the whole enterprise is about to be laid bare for the stupidest of reasons and the stooges are panicking - desperately trying to get shred the evidence by breaking the F1 contract in the vain hope they can hide it from the court. (Doubtful but previous legal proceedings have established they don’t know how any of this actually works)

Sounds like the guys who only signed on for afree lunch and so the company would have the semblance of a board want the loon in charge gone for damage control. Meanwhile he’s gone full Howard Hughes peeing in a bottle paranoid (note: maybe that’s the secret ingredient?) ranting on twitter.

I maintain the real crime in all this is that nobody has published a picture of a Whyte bike in any of these articles. The original Whyte PRST-1 was truly one of the most Jalop mountain bikes ever made: just look at that mind-bending collection of linkages!

Thanks to “ Benny Mac ” for mentioning that Jon Whyte was a suspension engineer for the Benneton F1 team, and the other designer was Adrian Ward (currently of McLaren). That’s a fantastic connection.

DISCUSSION (9)

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > zipfuel
07/12/2019 at 20:30

The front end of that bike is some next level stuff. There are only recently some parallel link forks being sold. trust and Lauf.

Kinja'd!!!

This is the trust fork and it has 130 mm of travel.

lone_liberal > zipfuel
07/12/2019 at 20:40

If Haas wanted to hide money from the IRS he could have just gone the offshore account route like every other rich guy and not got himself attached to wackos like the Rich CEO.

zipfuel > Highlander-Datsuns are Forever
07/12/2019 at 20:53

All their current bikes are considerably more normcore, it sounds like the problems with conventional forks they were trying to solve with that linkage got ironed out by the suspension makers and it wasn’t necessary anymore.

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/now-that-was-a-bike-whyte-prst-1.html

Kinja'd!!!

Still make pretty gorgeous bikes tho

zipfuel > lone_liberal
07/12/2019 at 20:57

But that’s exactly my point, those offshore accounts are great for hiding money but it’s very hard to spend it without the taxman catching wind. Hence you need some shady character who’s willing to set up (or already owns) a suitable front company to divert it back to your interests.

Energy drinks are the new tobacco companies in terms of sponsorship so this was perfect.

lone_liberal > zipfuel
07/12/2019 at 21:07

If he was really trying to avoid US taxes he could have registered the company in a place like the Caymans. My point being that there are a lot of legal ways that rich guys that made their money legally can avoid taxes without resorting to stuff like this. They pay lawyers and accountants a lot of money to figure that shit out. This smells more of laundering illegal money.

zipfuel > lone_liberal
07/12/2019 at 21:19

I fully agree -I’ve seen the corporate HQs of Barbados- but the guy has a history of doing stupid criminal tax stuff rather than hiring the usual suite of experts and playing it smart: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/business/20tax.html

I still don’t see who it benefits otherwise unless Rich Energy is booking bogus billion dollar revenues from less than 1000 sales on amazon. Or why do something so public as sponsor an F1 team (short of vanity and stupidity).

lone_liberal > zipfuel
07/12/2019 at 21:48

That’s true, you can’t discount stupidity or arrogance.

smobgirl > zipfuel
07/12/2019 at 22:32

How would the attempts to sponsor Force India and Williams first tie into this theory?

(I have no background in money laundering so I can’t really think this through to its entirety)

zipfuel > smobgirl
07/12/2019 at 23:00

It does derail it a bit if I’m honest.

I could suggest they never intended to buy Force India and were just inserting themselves into the dialogue . Then met with Williams just for show right before signing with Haas ( Williams are so desperate for money these days they’d bend over backwards to sign with anyone so why didn’t that deal go through? I mean aside from them sucking on track).

But this does all feel rather like making the facts fit the story and assigns a level of guile to these characters that I’m not certain they possess.