Effort To Fete Two-Time SEC Pyramid Defendant And Alleged Racketeer Sann Rodrigues In Brazilian Senate Hall Reportedly Thwarted
Sann Rodrigues. From a promo for a March TelexFree event in Spain at which Sann Rodrigues was feted.
Politicians appear to have spared themselves some embarrassment, but MLM had another La-La Land PR train wreck today.
iG (Brazil) is reporting that an effort to honor accused TelexFree pitchman and two-time SEC defendant Sann Rodrigues in a Brazilian Senate hall today was thwarted. The effort to fete Rodrigues appears to have been staged by a Brazilian MLM cheerleader, who reportedly also wanted Rodrigues named to the Multilevel Marketing Regulatory Agency of Brazil, which is not a government arm despite its name.
The effort collapsed when iG contacted a Senate member, iG reported.
From a translation from Portuguese to English by Google translate (italics added):
The event was canceled after the iG contacting the office of Senator Cicero Lucena (PSDB-PB), which had made the reservation request the auditorium Petronio Portella Senate at the request of Regino Barros.
An assessor’s office reported that such requests are common and that senators do not participate in drawing up the list.
Earlier this month Rodrigues was accused of racketeering by TelexFree members suing the enterprise and several individuals, including accused TelexFree Ponzi schemers James Merrill and Carlos Wanzeler and MLM attorney Gerald Nehra.
TelexFree staged a March 1 and March 2 awards ceremony in Madrid, Spain, at which Rodrigues was feted. Nehra also was feted, but appears not to have shown up to accept the award.
Merrill, Wanzeler and Steve Labriola, another TelexFree SEC defendant, also were feted at the Madrid event. Merrill was jailed in the United States two months later, and Wanzeler allegedly fled to Brazil and became a fugitive.
The massive TelexFree pyramid- and Ponzi scheme began to collapse on March 9, just a week after the Madrid event, according to court filings and other documents.
“Rodrigues used investor funds to buy expensive automobiles, including a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and two Mercedes Benz,” the SEC charged in an amended TelexFree complaint earlier this week. (See May 27, 2014, PP Blog story.)
In 2006, Rodrigues was named an SEC defendant in a complaint that charged he operated a pyramid scheme involving phone cards. The phone-card scheme was targeted at the Brazilian community, the SEC said at the time.
In April 2014, he was named one of eight individual defendants in the SEC’s TelexFree action.
TelexFree also offered a communications product and, like the 2006 Rodrigues scheme, was targeted at the Brazilian community. TelexFree also targeted Latinos, according to records.
another series:, “Shame”
Sann is the real menthor of Telexfree. After being catch by SEC in the prior pyramid (phoneclub) and barely escaping from bars with the ridicolous excuse that ‘he didnt know’ what he was doing was a piramid, he started to be more carefull, and put allways other people to be president and director in the next scams.
Going back in the timeline, this is the story: He started in the ‘business’ much earlier by doing small frauds in Acre (one of brazilian states), where he is from. After some law suits people moved against the fake companies he created there, he then decided to live in USA and the rest you already know.
Is not a coincidence that Acre was by far the worse affected place by Telexfree in Brazil, with some cities economy almost completely ruined. This is because he expanded his network of investors thru his personal contacts.