Not just prize money which is anti-competitive – Ecclestone

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In the round-up: Bernie Ecclestone says the distribution of prize money in Formula One is not the only way the sport might be considered “anti-competitive”.

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Keith Collantine
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84 comments on “Not just prize money which is anti-competitive – Ecclestone”

  1. “Everyone is responsible for himself”
    Wrong.

    If somebody shoots you in the face and you die, it’s not because you’re irresponsible.
    Basically the same thing is happening with Sauber and the other small teams.

    1. You are right, although in fairness (I think this came up yesterday) Kaltenborn is largely responsible for a lot of what has happened to Sauber. She has really made a mess of managing things. Compare them to Force India, similar financial situation yet they are a relatively respectable competitor, beyond just performance. That said, Sauber’s failings do not justify Bernie’s actions.

    2. I think Lauda’s definition of responsibility spans from his hands on experience of wrecking Hamilton’s gearboxes so Lewis would sign for Mercedes and having no repercussions at all.

      1. @peartree, I presume that you are joking – after all, I presume that you are aware that McLaren’s gearboxes are designed, manufactured, installed and maintained by McLaren’s own staff (McLaren have always made their own transmission throughout the entirety of their relationship with Mercedes).

        @bascb, with regards to the question of not knowing what their competitors were signing up to – as far as I am aware, under UK law a third party does not have an automatic right to know what contract terms were signed between two parties.

        I would not be surprised if, even though the two are working together in their protest, Sauber and Force India have not revealed to each other what terms they signed with FOM. A team like Sauber does not have any legal entitlement to know what contract terms were signed between FOM and Force India – similarly, Force India would have no right to know what contract terms were agreed between Sauber and FOM.

        If anything, FOM could flip the situation around and argue that Sauber would be acting in an unlawful manner if they were demanding the details of the contract terms between themselves and another team – such a move could be considered as evidence of collusion between the teams.

    3. It would almost be funny to read, if it weren’t as sad. Lauda goes on to say Sauber signed “the concorde agreement” when the current one is just an agreement between the FIA and FOM and the teams got offered seperate contracts which all were different, without knowing what their competitors were signing up to.

      I guess its true that its the big teams who stand to lose most from their position of power being challenged (losing both money from the historic deals as well as influence from being in the strategy group)

      1. ColdFly F1 (@)
        19th October 2015, 8:04

        I guess your last point @bascb is the most important when reading his comments; Lauda is hardly impartial in this!

    4. Coming from a man in the top echelon of an extremely well funded team which has so much financial
      clout it’s embarrasing, in other circumstances, Lauda’s remarks would be quite amusing.
      But the fact that there is a slight chance that the EU regulators will take action against F1 financial structures
      which are at best questionable, and at worst are totally illegal; well, that does create an entirely different
      perspective, Could it be that Mercedes, like Ferrari and possibly Red Bull greatly fear exposure to total
      transparency being forced upon all F1’s money matters ? And not just transparency but a radical
      adjustment which ensures a level playing field for all F1’s competing teams ? Now that really would set a
      cat among the pigeons, wouldn’t it ?

      1. but a radical adjustment which ensures a level playing field for all F1’s competing teams

        Never going to happen. The EU investigation isn’t going to change that either, in fact I doubt it will change anything in F1 given that the EU is just as corrupt as F1 & Bernie himself.

        1. A fair and true analysis that! Who, afterall, watches the watchmen? (Rolex?)

  2. Well, when Ecclestone is too busy to talk nonsense, you can expect either Lauda or Helmet Marko to be the first to fill the gap. They always do. After hearing them for so many times, I don’t even expect anything better from them.

  3. Lauda, please, shut up.

    1. He can´t. His team was the most benefitted one from the state of affairs in current F1. If EU complaint goes anywhere, Mercedes will sudenlly go from unbeatable to just a very rich team without any uncompetitive advantage, and I´m not denying they did their hard work. I´m just saying that the rules that were designed to give the advantage just to the richest teams with Mercedes upfront (as they were a lot ahead of competitors when the new engines came in) would have to be changed by somebody REALLY insterested in a “more or less level playing field”. It is amusing how clear everythig got after all the Red Bull mess: there was bet that only the 4 biggest (and works teams) could win, but Renault and Honda did not deliver. The rest of it is just history.

      1. Red Bull Renault won 3 races last year, while Red Bull and Ferrari both had larger budgets than Mercedes.

        Also, the works team argument holds water, considering that ONLY the Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari works teams have won races in the new turbo era.

        1. In most seasons with V10 and V8 engines only the works teams have won with very few independents ever winning a race in the last 20 years. Since 1996 I can think of Ligier, Jordan, Torro Rosso I am sure there are one or 2 more, you can also say Brawn won a title but everyone knows they got a works spec engine from Merc along with hundreds of millions from Honda to develop that chassis so not an independent small team as I would think of it.

          1. Top of my head – Redbull won with a Renault engine while there was a Renault works team, as did McLaren win with a Mercedes Engine while there was a Mercedes works team. Lotus and Williams won in 2012 while Redbull was the favored engine partner. As you say, Torro Rosso with a Ferrari engine….

          2. McLaren still had a works agreement at that point with Merc, they were not paying for the engines, Red Bull is a bit different as their budget was so large and V8 engines had at that point been going for 4 years, will see in 2018 if only manufacturers are still winning but in F1 history works teams win nearly all the time, the 2nd year of the V6 engines has not even finished yet.

          3. petebaldwin (@)
            19th October 2015, 17:36

            The works teams do usually win because they have the biggest budgets. The difference is that the other teams had a chance in the past as evidenced by Toro Rosso, Ligier, Stewart, Jordan and so on. Those sorts of teams don’t have a chance anymore because pace is now too reliant on the engines and they don’t have the option to buy one that is competitive.

        2. Stop spreading your lies. Mercedes have invested massively in their F1 team and their budget is as high as it gets.
          That doesn’t even include the investments in engine development leading up to and during 2014. Numbers between 500 and 800 MILION € are floating around. They worked hard sure, but they also threw money around like no one ever had!¡

          1. Lies? Engine development aside, they had the third largest budget for 2014.

            http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/formula1/29905081
            https://infogr.am/team-f1-2014-budget-and-employees

            I mean, it’s hard to get solid figures and I could be wrong, but I just go by what I see.

            They seem to have the second largest budget for 2015, behind RBR.

          2. That quoted 500 million was for 2014 and 200 million of that was engine development. So the team still has an operational budget of “only” 300million.

          3. Wow so Merc spend 500 million plus on the engine then 200 million a year on top of that to develop it so in 2 years so far the full cost is around 900 million. They supply 3 teams at around 75 million a year between them so have over 2 years recouped 150 million but spent 900 million a 750 million loss. For that they have got 2 straight titles which is probably worth it but then how anyone could think they should give all that advantage away to Red Bull for an additional 15 million a year is compete business stupidity.

  4. I actually got a mention. Cool.

    1. ColdFly F1 (@)
      19th October 2015, 8:08

      Well deserved! Funny caption @stigsemperfi (Whoever loses has to go ask Renault for our engines back).

    2. laughing out loud!

  5. That’s certainly not a selfie – technically

    1. Looks too far away to have the phone in his hand, but he could be using a selfie stick?

    2. @hunocsi, Indeed. It’s weird how people keep calling that a selfie when it was obviously not a selfie.

      But then people call sending a WhatsApp message: “I’ll send you an app”. Ehm, “no you won’t”

      @neilosjames, If you see the full picture you can see both hands.

  6. If the 1st. RussianGP was 2014 how is it that the crowd there this year were complaining to Bernie that the noise is not as good as it used to be.

    1. @hohum, I would assume that most of those in the crowd would have been drawing a comparison between the sound of the engines from the TV coverage in previous years. They might have not visited a race track beforehand, but I would imagine most of them would have been watching the sport for a few years and therefore already formed an impression of the sport.

      1. True, but TV volume is what you want it to be, to truly understand the volume you have to be at a track.

        1. artificial racer
          20th October 2015, 23:24

          It is possible that some of them traveled to a grand prix elsewhere in years past, and did not only just learn of F1’s existence in 2014.

    2. Russians have made a fine art out of complaining.

      1. I mean Russians who can afford to attend Grand Prix weekends have made a fine art out of complaining.

  7. I think Niki Lauda is great and I usually agree with everything he says, but that comment comes as a disappointment. I truly hate people in his position saying that the financial strife of the minnows is self-inflicted, and that they should function within their means. It’s easy for him to say that when his team has a multi-billion dollar company behind it. Surely he, of all people, must know how financially difficult it is to compete in F1.

  8. I love how it is the teams fault that ticket prices are so high, somehow if they were getting less than 65% of the revenue Bernie reckons he could lower the fee for holding a race, whereas my logic reckons that the fee could be reduced if the teams were getting 90% of the revenue.

  9. Monisha isn’t complaining because they’re not competitive. She’s complaining because she holds a 33.3% stake in Sauber and it’s a business to her. The more they make the more she makes. She wants to line her own pockets. We’ve seen already how unscrupulous she is. Making money is fine, but it isn’t reason to scream ‘unfair’ all of a sudden when for years Sauber was doing pretty well on the track with a small budget.

    1. How do you line your pockets by owning shares in a loss making business?

      1. Depends how much to pocket out of the ‘operating budget’ and how much tax you want to save.

        1. Nope, it doesn’t. Payments to shareholders always fall at the bottom of payment “waterfalls”. Interest and capital repayments on your borrowings first, then approved operating costs, then all the rest of the outgoings, then, last of all and only if there is anything left, the shareholders get paid. No manner of creative accounting can hide a dividend to a shareholder as an operating cost.

          1. I think he means her pay as a team principal not as a shareholder but yeah i do not see it.

    2. You seem to know an awful lot about Monisha Kaltenborn. Are you her husband or something?

      1. Wishes are fishes, etc.

    3. petebaldwin (@)
      19th October 2015, 17:42

      @selbbin Monisha is simply fighting the “good” cause so people back her. If she was working for Mercedes, she’d be saying the opposite.

      Everyone in F1 is fighting for themselves and doesn’t care about the rest of the teams. They simply want to find any gap in the rules to exploit, anything they can appeal against to make the rest slower and any will grab any penny they can get their hands on.

      Red Bull are complaining because they want a faster engine. Ferrari and Mercedes are refusing to supply teams they are scared of because they want to win races and can’t build a car as fast as Red Bull. Sauber and Force India are going to the EU because they want more money. Bernie is threatening to drop Monza because he wants more money.

      It’s like watching a bunch of school kids – GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME!

      1. petebaldwin (@)
        19th October 2015, 17:43

        Just re-read that – I’m not saying she’s fighting the good cause so that people back her – I’m saying she is fighting the good cause and therefore people back her.

  10. PS. Australian MotoGP was another ripper!

    1. @hohum I’m glad I woke up to watch it live. People keep coming with WEC prophecies, especially people who’ve never watched WEC. MotoGP is intrinsically good for racing, motogp has it’s problems which will be solved with the upcoming rule change, nevertheless motorbike racing relies on mechanical grip, slipstream and sheer amounts of skill, at any given moment anything can happen. Recipe for falling in love with racing.
      PS: I don’t even like the actual bikes.

    2. @hohum Best track for MotoGP bikes (for me), a Marquez who does not fall off his bike downunder for once, and four of the best drivers the field has ever seen = brilliant race. Loved every bit of it.

      1. MotoGP is as exciting as racing can be in this high tech era. As a fan of many disciplines, I like its sheer physicality. My woman is semi-interested in F1 because of the political (re: soap opera) aspects, yet she will follow every turn of a close MotoGP race. Maybe it’s the bums in stretched leather?

  11. There’s something about Bernie in person that just doesn’t come across in text.

    After watching the video what he says makes perfect sense. If all the teams agreed to equal the payments then yes he’d do it, simple as that. But it’s the teams themselves that don’t want that.

    You can’t really blame Him for that, blame the teams that are getting those historical payments and don’t want to lose that.

    1. Just wanted to add a bit more to that because it’s not the first time I’ve watched a Bernie interview and been surprised. He’s incredibly like-able I think. It’s easy to call him an old senile rat and disagree with him as many did on his Putin comments.

      But at least he’s saying what he believes, putting his point of view out there, most importantly honestly, which is very, incredibly rare these days.

      1. There is something I think is being missed in all this dscussion about money: if the payments were more equitable, the “minnows” would not be able to use the extra money to get more competitive. All that would be necessary was yet another change of rules to bring even more expensive technologies in, provided such technologies could be afforde only by the biggest teams anyway.
        The main problem, and Bernie is part of it, is in the governance of the sport. There is no need of a cost cap. It would be enough to have rules that alowed for innovations not necessarily impossible to pay for. Forcing expensive technologies is a very failsafe way of avoiding that somebody with 10% of your big budget could honestly win you out of inventiveness. This has more to do with rule-making than with price tags.

      2. Tristan – Charisma and honesty are not synonyms.

        And you capitalising H in him was rather funny, seeing as a capitalised pronoun in the middle of sentences is saved for reference to a god…which Bernie is not but no doubt thinks it

        1. I thought that was hilariously revealing. It’s not exactly surprising to find out that a successful businessman is very charismatic – there’s a reason these people like to make deals in person rather than letting the other party think through the terms.

      3. he’s saying what he believes, putting his point of view out there, most importantly honestly

        Hahaha, Bernie and Max do charm and credibility so well. It’s almost impossible not to fall for it, even when you know they’re doing it.

    2. @tristan, Yes, but you have to remember who it was that offered a couple of teams extra money to cut the feet out from under the rest of the teams when the concorde expired. It’s a common trait amongst the rich and powerful, being able to turn on the charm and convince you of their sincerity.

    3. Someone must be to blame for the lack of power that F1 has over itself both financially and sporting wise. I don’t think Bernie is wrong, I don’t think he has given up. Everyone by now must know that in life you can’t have x amount of leaders, you need 1 leader if you ought to make a change, and you put 100 people playing The King and I you’re not going anywhere.

      1. @peartree, like Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, save all others”, a benevolent dictator is very hard to find, Hitlers and Putins are more common, they certainly know how to get things done but at a very high price.

        1. @hohum You can’t please everyone. The only way not disturb people is to do nothing at all. What has Putin done wrong to the Russian people? Russia was growing, some important people didn’t like it, now the ruble is falling. The public campaign worked like a charm.

          1. @Tristan Bernie is a master of Public Relations, and his every gesture should therefore become suspect.

          2. @peartree: Putin has done plenty wrong by the Russian people. He imprisons political opponents at every turn, not to mention social activists and artists. Anyone who is not with him is against him. Perhaps when the technocrats reach the end of their leash, motorsport fans will reach the end of theirs.
            As fans of Winner Take All sports, we shouldn’t confuse our enthusiasm with Winner Take All Politics. I like speed as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t make me a Futurist.

    4. @tristan – There is a reason that Bernie is still where he is. He can be charming while wedging people and organizations against each other for his own gain or for the outcome which suits his purposes best. Speaking to him in person he makes it sound like someone else stole the shirt right off your back. In reality, he took your shirt, bartered it to your rival and then made money off of both of you. Then he tells the media that he is merely trying to bring both parties together, but they must decide to cooperate and it is out of his hands.

      Beware, Bernie has a silver tongue and knows how to use it. He can charm you into complacency or be so politically incorrect outrageously blunt that it distracts folks from what the real issues are. Recall his incredible guile that has helped him slither in and out of his high level legal predicaments that would have completely overwhelmed and consumed the average person. Bernie says what suits Bernie. I don’t know if he really believes everything he says, but he makes you believe he does. Some might call this a gift. Others may classify it differently.

      1. I classify Bernie’s gift differently.

    5. So Tristan, from your comment I take it that you mean to say that watching Bernie “live” makes you understand how he does it as he comes over as making so much sense, being reasonable, straight talking?

      If so, then yes, I agree. Its a lovely example of how he can maintain his position. On another note. The simple fact that Bernie is there with his buddy Max, being interviewed by a large German TV station and making these arguments, shows how good he is at strategics and tactics.

      I guess Bernie is now preparing to take the EU complaints and drive it home to come out as good as he can for CVC!

    6. If all the teams agreed to equal the payments then yes he’d do it, simple as that. But it’s the teams themselves that don’t want that.

      When he’s the one who went to Ferrari and Red Bull and offered them huge bonuses which weren’t available to other teams, it’s obviously disingenuous of him to blame the teams for the distribution of prize monies.

      Let’s debunk Ecclestone’s reasoning using the thing he hates most: democracy. If he’d asked the teams to vote on how the money should be distributed, giving them the option of distributing the money evenly or giving the vast majority of it to just two or three unspecified teams, they would have picked the first one because picking the second would give each of them a better-than-evens chance of being at a huge financial disadvantage.

      In much the same way elsewhere in the same interview Ecclestone blamed the teams for high ticket prices because of the share of the prize money they receive. He ignores the facts that CVC are pumping billions out of the sport which F1 will never see again, and that his punishingly high price escalator for track fees was set up long before the teams strong-armed him into increasing their share of earnings.

      Ecclestone is trying to blame the teams for the mess he is responsible for.

      1. +1

        I hope this EU complaint has him sweating, but I doubt he is.

        1. petebaldwin (@)
          19th October 2015, 17:45

          Why sweat about something you can pay your way out of?

      2. @keithcollantine Pretty much what I was going to say even though I haven’t sat through the whole video.

        The huge Ferrari bonuses have been going on for years and years. The smaller teams have always had to make due with much less because F1 is supposed to be hard and they are supposed to have a plan to grow and succeed because they wanted to be in F1 to begin with and had to prove why they were worthy.

        BE is blaming the teams because that is false, but if you tell a lie often enough you get a percentage of people believing it. He only just finished saying, in Russia, that F1 is not democratic, and here also saying it isn’t just prize money that is anti-competitive, so let’s call it like it is. F1 is a dictatorship and a big rich boys club, and expecting fairness to come from that is folly. Full stop.

        The haves will continue to look after themselves because that is the way this boys club wants it. Nothing will change that. Smaller teams just need to be aware of that and either avoid F1 or enter knowing much will be out of their control. Maybe it takes the Haas’ of the world to keep the grid size up, because he actually said NASCAR was more dictatorial than F1, so I guess he’s happy with what he has gotten himself into, namely global branding, but there can’t be too many more on the cusp of entering F1, happy with the parameters.

        It’s not a money issue, it’s a greed issue. And an entitlement issue.

        1. @robbie

          I haven’t sat through the whole video.

          A lot of it is just repeats of things both of them have said many, many times before. You can almost sing along at times!

      3. @keithcollantine As an F1 representative he made the best deal he could for his side. This action does not imply a change of logic. His logic is right that’s how teams should have dealt with the situation, according the legislation at hand. The EU may prompt future changes but I doubt anything will change for the short term. The EU is what forced Bernie and Max to commit the mistake of selling F1 to cvc. What Bernie is doing by saying the truth can be seen as Bernie giving himself a pat on the back.

      4. Thank you for your expert analysis and attention. Sllow me to coin a phrase, in light of Bernie’s comments:
        “The show should go on.”
        gasp.

    7. petebaldwin (@)
      19th October 2015, 17:44

      Why do the teams need to agree to anything though? I thought Bernie liked dictatorships?

  12. Haven’t heard Lauda in 2013. He started talking when Mercedes was winning. He is a guy that doesn’t have honor. In life you should learn how to be a man when winning and also when losing. Lauda is doing nothing in Mercedes. His job ended when he landed HAM. When things doesn’t go his way he quits. He is a traitor. Senile old as his pal B. Lauda….are you afraid of Sauber?

    1. @mumito he’s gloating, he has no sympathy for Sauber and he’s having a laugh at them. You are right he thinks he’s smarter than everyone because he somehow managed to sign Lewis.

  13. You guys have forgotten what petrov looks like, that is not him, it is a joke photo.

    1. The text says ‘sent in by a fan’.

  14. The discussion on The F1 Show last Friday with regards to the distribution of funds in F1 was really good.

    Pat Symonds raised the point that last season, Chelsea’s prize money for winning the BPL was 99 million GBP, while QPR, who finished last, still pocketed 65 million GBP. This is a healthy rewards system, where teams get rewarded purely based on their finishing position in the championship.

    I would like to think that F1 can employ the same framework if the CVC didnt take off 50% (or whatever) off the top of the pot.

    1. Of course what complicates it is this is not football where no money needs be spent to field a winning team beyond the athletes themselves, whereas F1 requires huge financial and infrastructure commitments.

      I doubt CVC will be swayed from their take, nor be interested in fairness. It’s about greed and entitlement for them and for F1 and BE. Methinks they’d actually rather see F1 die than give up their greed…ie. if we can’t have our way nobody else will either.

      1. petebaldwin (@)
        19th October 2015, 17:58

        Are you honestly suggesting that you can field a winning team in the Premiership without spending money? I read that the Red Bull budget was around £200m a season? Manchester United signed ONE player and he cost over a quarter of that entire budget last year.

        Then you’ve got the wages. Let’s be HUGELY conservative and say an average wage at a club like Manchester United is £50k a week. They’ll have 20 players in their first team squad so in wages alone, that’s £52m

        So we’re already over £100m without even looking at the other costs! Wages for the coaches, kit men, drivers, sports scientists, scouts, youth players, groundsmen, accountants and other office staff. Maintenance of the training ground and stadium including professional top class pitches. Police costs. Travel/Hotel costs. Profits for the owners. Massive insurance costs against the facilities and players (F1 teams don’t have to worry about the safety of 80,000 people visiting their HQ every other week!). The list could just go on and on…

        1. @petebaldwin Let me be a little more clear as I did say no money beyond the athletes themselves. Football requires money spent on the athletes, and as you point out all the ancillary costs mainly to do with other staffing that I didn’t mention, which F1 has to do as well. Maintanence of their facilities etc etc. And then there is all the money spent on putting the actual car on the track which football doesn’t have, and that could be 100’s of millions and it might not even be that competitive often based on the quality of that staff. So all I meant was that both football and F1 probably have to spend just as much on athletes and support staff which can be in the hundreds of people as you know, but then an F1 team has to also spend to field a car which will more often than not, not win them the WDC, in spite of that huge cost.

          My main point was that football teams just need shoes, a ball, and a pitch, and are dependent for succes on a group of good athletes and a coach and management who hopefully have put said good group together, whereas F1 teams and the way F1 works is way more complicated because an actual highly expensive piece of kit needs to be employed too. The costs to field a football team would be relatively fixed year to year, aside from the number of top athletes they have, whereas in F1 they can and do spend all the money they can get their hands on and that is often still not good enough, and the more the top teams spend the more the lesser teams need to be spending if they can get it, to keep up. So where does one draw the line in shuffling more money to those teams.

          Setting aside the money issue, in NHL hockey, the teams that do the worse in a season are the ones that get the top draft picks of new young players coming up. Not sure if football works the same way, but what it does is ensure that even if some teams in some markets have more resources, all teams have some chance of being fairly close to each other in performance. Ie. if some teams always lose with seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel people will simply stop buying tickets, especially in southern markets where ice skating and hockey are much less on the radar than for us northerners in Canada. Inject the odd top prospect who has to start out on a bottom team until he can become a free agent, and interest in the team remains relatively healthy. It would be like F1 having a draft such that the next LH is likely selected by Manor (who would be given first dibs as the bottom team) giving them hope and fan draw rather than him going to the highest bidder to only further isolate the top teams from the bottom ad infinitum.

          I’m not against better money distribution to the smaller teams, but I do question small teams being vetted saying why and how they would enter F1 and make a go of it, as they must, only for them to end up holding out their hands, and I question where you draw the line on that. And of course I question that there is even enough caring within F1 by those concerned to even entertain a better distribution.

          1. @robbie, whilst you say that the costs should be relatively static in football, it was nevertheless the case that teams in the Premier League were racking up colossal debts.

            As recently as 2012, the teams in the Premier League were collectively bringing in over £2.3 billion a year – however, the Premier League teams were running at a net loss of £360 million a year, even with the relatively flat payments system they have in place. It was only when the series brought in regulations that had elements of cost capping that the series as a whole became profitable – before that, the teams had collectively been running at a lost for 16 years in a row.

            To a certain extent, whilst flattening the payment structure might make some difference, I don’t think it will be the panacea that many think it is. Whilst it may work in the shorter term, in the longer term I suspect that it will end up shifting the spending curve upwards and just create a new base line for spending – we have seen it happen elsewhere within the field of motorsport, as well as in other sports.

            As much as some might find it unpalatable, it seems that generally the system only works when you adopt both favourable and punitive measures – in other words, tying the increased revenue with restrictions on spending that force teams to operate at a profit.

  15. A firm:
    – which sells a single, self-admittedly poor product, with no prospect of improvement on the horizon, manufactured by third parties, several of whom are on the verge of collapse and/or involved in legal struggles against said firm;
    – led by an 84-year-old man with no clear successor, who goes around giving interviews in which he says nice things about Hitler;
    – the controlling interest of which is held by a hedge fund;
    – and for which investors are lining up trying to get a piece;
    is being LOOTED.

  16. Yeah.. Bernie is now gonna turn Eu to help him

    1. He has criminal friends in high places.

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