jagalman
06-10-2007, 03:18 AM
I have participated in a maraton for 10 km! and here is the result! there was like 2000 competitor!
Yes thats me! :)
http://www.asdeporte.com/eventos/certif40_pdf.php4?evento=2148&op=3&certif=1&catnum=SAM&numero=678
soglad
06-10-2007, 03:23 AM
Oh holy mother of God!!!
Good luck is all I can say! :D
jagalman
06-10-2007, 03:24 AM
Oh holy mother of God!!!
Good luck is all I can say! :D
Lol! i have finished it! i am competitor number 26! i did the 10 km in 56:31 minutes
and thats a certificate for that! ;P
soglad
06-10-2007, 03:25 AM
Oh, and you're still alive!
That's an achievement! Fair play to ya!!! :D
soglad
06-10-2007, 03:25 AM
I couldn't run for my dinner!
jagalman
06-10-2007, 03:26 AM
I couldn't run for my dinner!
hehe i know! you just like to block people from posting here! because simply u cant run! :p
Opinion on what? It is one page written in a language most of us don't speak :confused:
10km is not a marathon. A half marathon is 21 kms, however, good on you . It is more than I could do.
jagalman
06-10-2007, 03:34 AM
Opinion on what? It is one page written in a language most of us don't speak :confused:
10km is not a marathon. A half marathon is 21 kms, however, good on you . It is more than I could do.
Well yes its maraton! its a certificate in spanish! :)
there is 10 and 42 km! 10 u have to be more faster then the 42! 42 is more resistance!
at least i run and i was the 26!
gorgeousbutterfly
06-10-2007, 03:40 AM
26 out of how many people? either way you did good :D
Well yes its maraton! its a certificate in spanish! :)
there is 10 and 42 km! 10 u have to be more faster then the 42! 42 is more resistance!
at least i run and i was the 26!
Cool! Good effort out of 2000 :)
jagalman
06-10-2007, 03:41 AM
26 out of how many people? either way you did good :D
thanx! there was like 2000! :eek:
tinmenace
06-10-2007, 05:02 AM
Congratulations! That sure is an achievement.
You in Venezuela?
nickatnoon61
06-10-2007, 07:55 AM
Lol! i have finished it! i am competitor number 26! i did the 10 km in 56:31 minutes
and thats a certificate for that! ;P
jagalman, that is nothing 56:31!!!:mad: I did more miles than that, in half the time...but the cops were chasing me!!! ha ha :D
nickatnoon61
06-10-2007, 07:56 AM
hehe i know! you just like to block people from posting here! because simply u cant run! :p
Good answer Jagalman!!! ha ha :D
jagalman
06-10-2007, 12:10 PM
Congratulations! That sure is an achievement.
You in Venezuela?
Yup! i am here! :D
lumukanda
06-10-2007, 12:21 PM
congratulations are in order, well done! i can't even run up the bloody stairs.
Yup! i am here! :D
Are you familiar with the Vestey family?
I live next door to one of the Vestey family and they seem like nice people to me, even Lord 'spam' himself.
However.. they used to own vast expanses of you country (amongst other things) and I was just wondering what the perception of the Vestey family, and their activities, was in Venezuela at the moment, jagalman?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4721961.stm
Sorry for the huge cut & paste but it's the easiest way to get across a bit of background information
The creation of the family's vast fortune is the stuff of legend. The official Vestey version tells the story of its founder William Vestey, working in the Chicago stockyards, in the last century - an existence laid bare on the stage by Bertolt Brecht. The founder of the dynasty recognised the potential value of the wasted meat products, which at the time were in short supply in Britain, and teamed up with his brother Edmund in the canning business.
They quickly came to realise that imported meat could be even more valuable if it were fresh rather than canned; they first experimented with a cold store owned by a friend. The key was to tap into the vast supplies of beef in the Americas to meet demand in the UK. With the invention of the first ammonia-compression plant, refrigerated shipments became possible and the Vestey fortunes took a great leap forward.
By the early years of the century, the brothers had established cold storage businesses in Liverpool, Manchester, London and Hull and had even established an outpost in pre-revolutionary Russia. Union International had been born and was soon importing eggs from China (a trade which reached 40,000 tonnes at the outbreak of the second world war) and meat from New Zealand, Venezuela and Brazil. In Britain the Vesteys also began a retail business, which by the early 1990s had become the UK's largest butchering chain, JH Dewhurst, with more than 300 branches up and down the country.
The family controlled a vast array of business, including land and assets in South America and Europe as well as ranches, food processing groups, canning companies, commercial property and butchers chains. It became the largest private conglomerate in the world, a vertical food chain which stretched from the Andes to the high street in Norwich. "They did not live on the income; they did not live on the interest from their investments; they lived on the interest on the interest," Phillip Knightley wrote in his biography, The Rise and Fall of the House of Vestey.
As the empire expanded, the Vesteys made the most of their wealth by using it to join the land-owning establishment. William acquired a peerage. After being handed control of the business in 1954, the third generation Ronald Vestey and his brother Mark began to make the most of their wealth, joining the land-owning classes by buying a country seat at Stowell Park in Gloucestershire, which stands in 5,000 acres. The tradition was established of dispatching a personal cheque of £250,000 to each Vestey descendant on reaching the age of 18, to spend as they saw fit.
But at the same time as they were mixing with royalty, the family were also benefiting from a massive - and completely legal - tax avoidance scheme. Since the earliest days, Edmund and William had developed an obsession with taxation which they feared would be the ruin of their business. They wrote to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, demanding that they be exempt from income tax. King George V was so appalled by this behaviour, in the darkest days of the first world war, that he opposed William becoming a baron, but William handed over £20,000 to Lloyd George and got the title anyway.
And when the prime minister still refused to play ball, the family reacted first by going into tax exile in Argentina, then by setting up an elaborate avoidance scheme centred on a Paris trust which was the bane of Inland Revenue investigators for more than 60 years. "Trying to come to grips with the Vesteys over tax," one tax officer who attempted to take on the Vesteys is reputed to have said at the time, "is like trying to squeeze a rice pudding."
In 1980, a Sunday Times investigation revealed that in 1978, the Dewhurst chain paid £10 tax on a profit of more than £2.3m. By this time, Edmund's grandson, also Edmund, and his cousin, Lord Samuel, were at the helm. In an infamous remark the Tory grandee Lord Thorneycroft remarked: "Good luck to them."
Edmund's reaction to the story hardly encouraged much public sympathy either. "Let's face it. Nobody pays more tax than they have to. We're all tax dodgers aren't we?" He continued: "It has been worked according to the rules and is all quite legal. I believe that it has been to the benefit of this country." Lord Vestey managed to shrug off the allegations. "This matter has been taken to the highest court in the land and as far as I am concerned it is now settled." By the time the loophole was closed in 1991, experts estimate the family had legally avoided paying more than £88m in tax.
The Sunday Times revelations were followed four years later by further scandal in the Vestey family, this time involving not tax but a headless corpse, lesbianism, drugs, alcohol, insanity and depravity. In 1984, Lord Vestey's cousin, Michael Telling, killed his American bisexual wife Monika, butchering her body. Telling was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and jailed for life.
In the past decade, some of the gilding has been rubbed off the Vestey name. Insulated for much of the century from the vicissitudes of the British economy through the global spread of the family's meat businesses and masterly tax planning, the real world caught up with the designated heir, Edmund's son Tim.
As John Major's government imposed a vicious economic squeeze on the country, the Vesteys found themselves, for once in their lives, in much the same position as the rest of the country. As interest rates soared to record levels and the economy went into slump individuals with mortgages found their houses repossessed; small businesses collapsed like ninepins; public companies called in the receivers and even sprawling global empires like that controlled by the Vesteys found themselves under pressure from bankers.
At the end of 1990 the debt inside the empire rocketed from £269m to £420m after the family embarked on reckless expansion in areas as diverse as insurance and commercial property. The financial skills, for which generations of Vesteys had been renowned, vanished and a consortium of 70 banks, led by Lloyds, called a halt on the spending and demanded cutbacks and economies - fast.
"There were no financial controls," remarked former Lonrho executive Terry Robinson who was the first of the professional managers brought in to sort out the mess. "No one knew why borrowings were increasing because no one knew who was spending what."
This was not surprising given the sprawling nature of a business empire embracing dozens of interrelated companies, with the grandly named Union International at the core. The empire may have made sense on paper, but in practice it was ramshackle and uncontrolled.
Moreover, the nature of business was changing. Union International's monopoly of the refrigerated transport business was being challenged. And the rise of the supermarkets, with their own wholesaling operations and specialist butchering counters, meant that the meat trade was no longer the cash cow it had been in the middle of the century. In the mid-to-late 90s, first under former Lonrho man Robinson and later the Shell executive Sir John Collins, the Vestey family fought a rearguard action, putting personal money into the business and seeking to salvage their fortune from the banks. In 1995 they gave up the fight and Union International was put into administrative receivership, effectively relinquishing family control of these assets.
Predictably, however, this turmoil did not leave the Vesteys penniless. Personal assets, including the property and farming interests, have been hived off into a separate secretive company, the Vestey Group. Last year the rump family company was able to report that having slimmed itself down it was finally rid of its debt burden having sold off the shipping company Blue Star Line to P&O Nedloyd for £60m, far more than it was thought to be worth.
As a result, Sir John was finally free of having to check with the bankers before making any decisions on behalf of the Vesteys. It is also clear that despite the disruption to almost a century of prosperity the Vesteys have not been reduced to poverty. Their Star Reefers shipping line is one of the top five banana carriers in the world. Angliss, the food services arm of the business, is rapidly expanding and is seeking acquisitions in the Far East, America and Europe.
Old fortunes do not die. They have just moved from meat to fruit. And from tax avoidance to direct action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestey_Group#Current_situation
10k... thats not very far.. finishing 26th is not bad though.