:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/KXOUVOYDGFELXFKB6LY5ORBFTQ.jpg "Sky, the yacht that Luis Miguel hid behind a company from the British Virgin Islands")
The singer, with a long history of financial and legal problems, used a front company to register his boat in the Caribbean territory
Italian design, four cabins with capacity for eight passengers, 25 meters in length, luxury and comfort. So is theSky, the Azimut Flybridge yacht that Luis Miguel bought in mid-2013 And that was the object of desire of the paparazzi for years: an endless catwalk of romantic conquests, the scene of their parties and, until much of 2020, their refuge during the pandemic.
Pandora Papers , the latest leak from the International Investigative Journalism Consortium (ICIJ) , reveals that the Mexican singer turned to an opaque company in the British Virgin Islands to finalize this purchase, in a transaction in which his brother, Alejandro Gallego, was key. Basteri, and who was his assistant and right hand, Joe Madera.
The Gallego Basteri brothers formed Skyfall Marine Limited with the help of the Trident study, from the British Virgin Islands, the largest source of the leak, which has more than 11.9 million documents in which more than 3,000 Mexicans are named. Luis Miguel appears, with 50,000 shares, as the sole owner of the company, according to a share certificate dated June 13, 2013. Alejandro Gallego is the secretary and director of the company, according to a statement signed by the brother of the singer.
This financial maneuver makes it possible to hide from the public who the true owner of the yacht is. In the British Virgin Islands, confidentiality governs and it is prohibited by law to reveal the board of directors and who is the majority shareholder of a company, with fines ranging from $ 5,000 to $ 50,000 to whoever does so.
In the maritime parts of the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for example, there are records of the passage of the Sky through American waters, but there is no trace of the name of Luis Miguel Gallego Basteri, but of Skyfall Marine, the legal owner of the vessel.
The paperwork for the registration of the commercial company was handled by Madera. In the form completed by the executive assistant, it is detailed that the only reason to open the company is the acquisition of the boat and that the payment comes from the artist’s fortune. “The average balance of his accounts in the last year has remained in the six figures”, reads a reference letter granted by the HSBC bank subsidiary in the US, which assures that the singer had been his client for 16 years .
Luis Miguel identifies himself as a resident of Beverly Hills, with a US passport and a driver’s license issued in California . His brother Alejandro, on the other hand, presents a Spanish passport and a permanent resident card in Mexico, residing in a luxurious real estate development in Puebla.
The authors of this investigation searched for Madera by phone and email, contacted workers from the production of his Netflix series , as well as companies associated with the Gallego Basteri family, and sent a questionnaire to those who manage social networks from the artist, but got no response to multiple requests for comment.
“ Deep down, a yacht is emotion on the waters ”, boasts the Azimut catalog, the boat’s manufacturer, for the 2013-2014 Flybridge collection. “The shape of a fish, the fin of a shark, the foam of the sea … nature is my source of inspiration”, reviews Stefano Righini, the designer of the boat line. In the upper part, the boat houses a spacious lounge, with two opposite sofas, a Jacuzzi, a minibar and a dining room, finished off with a sunbathing area at the stern.
It’s right at the stern where one of the Sky’s best kept secrets is: the flag of the British Virgin Islands. In addition to the opacity about the identity of the owners, the Caribbean territory does not collect taxes on companies or boats.Starting a company like Skyfall Marine cost just $ 350 and, as it depends on the UK, the ships have the same protection as any other British vessel.The only thing that is charged is a fee for renewal of rights that is around $ 1,000 per year. All of these are “advantages” that the government of the small Caribbean archipelago itself promotes on official pages.
BVI paradise
Internationally designated as a tax haven, the British Virgin Islands have some 30,000 inhabitants, but more than 400,000 active shell companies. It is the world leader in offshore company creation . ” The laws are designed to function as an opaque system, with a government that has a very pro-business and pro-money mentality ,” says a researcher at the Tax Justice Project, an organization specializing in tax evasion. Since the mid-eighties, the offshore financial industry has established itself as one of the pillars of its economy, representing more than 51% of government revenues, according to official data.
The fight against money laundering depends practically on the offshore service providers . They are in charge of carrying out the so-called due diligence processes, in which it is checked that clients do not appear with a criminal record in specialized databases and Internet search engines.
For this reason, Luis Miguel had to present letters of recommendation when forming the company. “I have known Mr. Basteri for 10 years and in that period, he has always been honest and respectable, a person of good character, integrity and trustworthy,” reads a letter signed by Bill Zysblat of RZO, an artist representation agency. based in New York. “To my knowledge, he has never been in jail for any criminal offense or bankruptcy at any point in his long and successful career,” adds Zysblat.
Background
“The Sun,” however, has been shrouded in legal and economic mists on several occasions during its extensive career, a facet recognized even in the biographical series that Netflix produced . At the end of the eighties, Luisito Rey, the artist’s father, used an entity in Switzerland in which he accumulated around 20 million dollars as a result of the early years of the singer’s career, an amount similar to what he owed to the Mexican treasury , equivalent to three years of unpaid taxes. The controversy was settled with a millionaire fine, according to the Mexican press. “I had problems in Mexico with the Treasury for my taxes, which I did not know because I did not even handle my money,” said the singer in a 1993 interview for Argentine television.
Between 2006 and 2007 it was announced that Luis Miguel had not paid taxes on his luxurious 346-square-meter penthouse in Miami’s Jade skyscraper, with a debt that exceeded $ 132,000, and in 2012 he was forced to sell the property for alleged financial problems, as reported by the Mexican and US press, until it was able to acquire it again this year. In 2013, the same year in which he bought the Sky, it was also reported that he had to get rid of an immense 36,000-square-meter mansion in Playa Bonfil, in the Acapulco Diamante area, due to alleged financial problems, which is a recurring scenario in ” Luis Miguel, The series ”.
In August 2016, William Brockhaus, his representative between 2013 and 2015, sued him in a California court for a debt of more than a million dollars and breach of contract. During the litigation, the seizure of a 2013 Rolls Royce belonging to Luis Miguel was authorized, valued at $ 300,000, and after failing to appear three times to testify, the singer turned himself in in May 2017. At the trial, Madera was summoned to testify about the interpreter’s accounts, property and earnings, but in most cases he replied that he was not aware of his boss’s finances. His statements were not made public, although there is no mention in journalistic accounts of his testimony that the artist owned a yacht. Finally, Brockhaus reached an agreement with Luis Miguel.
By then, “El Sol” had two other legal fronts open: a lawsuit from his own record company, Warner Music, which demanded $ 3.6 million from him and another from the singer Alejandro Fernández for a joint tour in which Luis Miguel charged some seven million dollars up front and then did not perform. The artist ended up paying Warner and settling the debt with Fernández, according to Carlos Bremer, part of a group of businessmen who agreed to rescue him from the debts, among which was also Miguel Alemán Magnani, an intimate of the artist and, recently, a fugitive from Justice. It was during that stormy 2017, thatUnique, another yacht with which the singer has been related, was seized by the United States Marshals Corps for a liability of $ 120,000 in maintenance and the rent of a marina in Miami , according to the Univision network .
In 2020, after turning 50 years old and being seen on several occasions anchored alone in the Miami navy during the quarantine, Luis Miguel sold the Sky for a figure reported by the press of the heart of almost three million dollars.
Unpaid annuity
The financial problems are also reflected in the Pandora Papers documents . An email exchange in mid-2018 between Madera and Trident agents reveals that Skyfall Marine failed to meet its 2016 and 2017 annual quotas with the British Virgin Islands authorities . That forced the assistant to make a payment of $ 6,595 to reestablish the company and be able to renew the vessel’s registration. In addition, he was fined $ 5,000 for failing to complete the company’s board of directors.
In November of last year, already without assets, Skyfall Marine was dissolved, according to the registry of the British Virgin Islands, the most unsuspected hideout of “El Sol” in Mexico.
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