jueves, 28 de julio de 2022

Remuneración de directivos, socios y accionistas

Remuneración de directivos, socios y accionistas


INGRESOS ASIMILABLES A SALARIOS (LISR ART. 94 FR. III)

Beneficios

 1) Ahorro de IVA (Art. 14 2do parrafo LIVA)

2) Ahorro de cuotas de seguridad social, siempre que no haya subordinación laboral.

3) Adquirir servicios o bienes de quienes no expiden CFDI

SUBSIDIO AL EMPLEO. Los asimilables excepto los funcionarios publicos (Art. 94 fr I LISR) no tiene derecho al subsidio al empleo.

RETENCION DE ISR. Se hace en el pago a asimilables con tasa máxima del 35% salvo que existe una relación de trabajo (ART. 152 LISR)

DEDUCCION DE ISR DE LOS PAGOS DE ASIMILADOS A SALARIOS (ART 27 FR IX LISR)

A) Que el importe anual no sea superior al sueldo anual devengado por el funcionario de mayor jerarquía.

CRITERIO AISLADO TFJFA FUNCIONARIOS DE MAYOR JERARQUÍA QUÉ SE DEBE ENTENDER COMO TALES, PARA EFECTOS DE LA DEDUCCIÓN A QUE HACE ALUSIÓN EL ARTÍCULO 31, FRACCIÓN X, INCISO A) DE LA LEY DEL IMPUESTO SOBRE LA RENTA .- Para efecto de los requisitos de deducibilidad de las gratificaciones u honorarios que se otorgan a los administradores, comisarios, directores, gerentes generales o miembros del consejo directivo, de vigilancia, consultivos o de cualquier otra índole, se requiere que el importe anual establecido para cada persona no sea superior, al sueldo anual que devengue el funcionario de mayor jerarquía de la sociedad, en esos términos lo dispone el inciso a) de la fracción X del artículo 31 de la Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta, vigente en el año 2003, aun y cuando la Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta y ningún otro ordenamiento legal precisen, que debe entenderse por "el funcionario de mayor jerarquía", por lo que ante esa ausencia en la Ley, acudiéndose a la doctrina, se conoce que el funcionario de mayor jerarquía en la empresa será siempre el administrador único o el presidente del consejo de administración y, su sueldo anual es el que debe de servir como límite para determinar la percepción anual deducible de cada uno de los funcionarios, a los que refiere el precepto transcrito, luego, si una empresa desea gozar de ese beneficio fiscal de la deducción en comento, debe designar al funcionario de mayor jerarquía que dentro del consejo de administración llevará las facultades de dirección, administración, gerencia o vigilancia de la empresa y que además le otorgue un sueldo. (15) Juicio No. 700/03-01- 01-3.- Resuelto por la Sala Regional del Noroeste 1 del Tribunal Federal de Justicia Fiscal y Administrativa, e1 2 de octubre de 2003, por unanimidad de votos.- Magistrada Instructora: Lucelia Marisela Villanueva Olvera.- Secretaria: Lic. Clemencia González González. Quinta Época Sala Regional del Noroeste Revista del Tribunal Federal de Justicia Fiscal y Administrativa No. 54, Ano V, Junio 2005 Página 482 Criterio aislado





B) Que el importe total de las gratificaciones por asimilados no sea superior al monto de sueldos y salarios al personal

C) Que no exceden del 10% del monto total de las otras deducciones del ejercicio


SUBORDINACION. Deber de obediencia del trabajador y en consecuencia el don de mando del patrón.

***Se sugiere armar bien los contratos y formas**


SUJETOS OBLIGADOS PARA LSS (ART 12 LSS). Remunerado, personal y subordinado.

GERENTE GENERAL Gerente general de LGSM no es el gerente de un área sino el designado en estatutos.

CONSEJO DE ADMINISTRACION No hay limite de personas en el Consejo de Administración. Tipicamente son 3 (Art. 143 LGSM). La asamblea de accionistas podrá nombrar varios gerentes generales o especiales (ART. 145 LGSM).


GERENTE GENERAL Y ADMINISTRADOR UNICO. NO ES AFILIABLE AL IMSS.

Conforme a los artículos 142, 145 y relativos de la Ley General de Sociedades Mercantiles,

en una sociedad anónima existen tres jerarquías básicas en cuanto a los órganos que la

representan, que son: a) la asamblea general de accionistas, b) el administrador único o el

consejo de administración, y c) los gerentes generales y especiales. Siendo de notarse que es

característica de los administradores que no tienen arriba de ellos más que a la asamblea

general de accionistas, y que pueden ser tanto esta asamblea como aquellos administradores,

quienes están facultados para nombrar y remover a los gerentes generales y especiales. Así en

una sociedad existe un gerente administrador o administrador general, así designado, que no

tiene por encima de su autoridad más que a la asamblea general de accionistas, y que está

facultado para nombrar y remover gerentes generales o especiales, debe concluirse que se

está en el caso de un administrador único y gerente general. En estas condiciones, es de verse

que la Segunda Sala de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación ha sostenido, por una parte,

que los gerentes de las sociedades sí son afiliables al régimen del Seguro Social, aunque

tengan el carácter de accionistas, y por otra parte, que el administrador único y gerente

general de sociedad anónima, cuando ambos cargos son ejercidos por una misma persona, no

es sujeto del régimen del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro social, y que para determinar la

afiliación de un gerente general debe atenderse a su situación jurídica concreta y no sólo a su

denominación.

PRIMER TRIBUNAL COLEGIADO EN MATERIA ADMINISTRATIVA DEL PRIMER

CIRCUITO.

RF-121/71 (189/64). Pan American Company, S.A. 2 de agosto de 1971. Unanimidad de

votos. Ponente: Guillermo Guzmán Orozco.

Dependiendo de cada delegacion del IMSS te permiten asegurarlo. Aún cuando lo dejen asegurarlo, siempre hay problemas ante Infonavit y al momento de solicitar una pensión.

Para efectos de ISN, puede tener un tratamiento diferenciado. Habrá que considerar.



HONORARIOS POR SERVICIOS PREPONDERANTES A UN PRESTATARIO (ART 169 RLISR)

Mayor a 50% de ingresos por honorario y que se lleven a cabo en las instalaciones


COMPRA DE ACCIONES POR PERSONAS La utilidad por venta de acciones se considera como Ingresos asimilables. Un empleado o funcionario podra adquirir acciones si así lo considera el contrato social.

SEGUROS Los seguros por supervivencia son deducibles si tienen 5 años contratados, si la prima es pagada por el asegurado, si el asegurado alcanza los 60 años.

DIVIDENDOS (ART 16 LGSM) Son caros. Si provienen de UFIN no se piramidan (ART 16 3ER PARR LISR) y si no provienen de CUFIN se piramidan al 1.4286.

PRESTAMOS A ACCIONISTAS (ART 85 Y 123 LGSM) Prestamos a accionistas podrían considerarse dividendos fictos.

GASTOS NO COMPROBADOS. Son caros ya que se consideran no deducibles para la PM e ingresos por dividendo ficto para la persona fisica






sábado, 9 de julio de 2022

TOASTMASTER MANUEL SALGADO

 DISCURSOS DE TOASTMASTERS MANUEL SALGADO


DISCURSO ROMPEHIELOS – MANUEL SALGADO 23-03-2022

Un recorte de periódico convertido en un sueño…

Un discurso ganador convertido en una meta…

¿Alguien sabe cual es la diferencia entre un sueño y una meta?

Un saludo a todos, socios e invitados a Toasmaster, agradezco la oportunidad de participar en este foro en mi primer discurso llamado Rompehielos.

Ahmed Ahmed es un deportista paraolímpico español, quien posee el record de más medallas olímpicas, más incluso que Michael Phelps y el dice que no debemos de tener sueños sino metas.

Mi nombre es Manuel Salgado y les quiero compartir un sueño y una meta.

Mi sueño: Crecí en el puerto de La Paz Baja California Sur y en los lejanos años 80s mi único acceso al mundo exterior era la televisión y el periódico. A los 10 años, me gustaba hacer recortes de las notas de periódico que me llamaban la atención, en su mayoría deportivas. Recuerdo que una vez vi un artículo titulado “Singapur, el país del futuro” y paso a ser parte de mi colección de recortes. Yo creo que me imaginaba un lugar como en los Supersonicos, con coches que vuelan, escaleras eléctricas a todas partes, robots y computadoras automatizando todos los trabajos. 22 años después, ya como contador publico, tuve la oportunidad de trabajar para una compañía china y quería vivir en Asia, mi sueño era Singapur. Así que hice un plan, estudie como loco, mejore mi nivel de inglés, ahorre un poco y aplique a pesar de las pocas posibilidades de éxito para una maestría en una de las 2 universidades públicas en Singapur ganando una beca al 100% y gastos de manutención. Así que hice mis maletas, y me subí al avión con mi esposa embarazada y mi niño de 3 años a un viaje que se convirtió en una de las mejores experiencias de mi vida.

Mi meta: Desde niño he sido una persona muy callada, de pocas palabras. Nunca fui el alma de la fiesta, nunca fui extrovertido, son una persona de pocos amigos. Cada vez que tenía que hablar en público me muero de nervios, me sudan las manos, y se me borra todo en la cabeza. Hace poco me tope en internet con un discurso del campeón mundial de Toastmaster de 2014, Dananjaya Hettiarachchi, originario de Sri Lanka y fui increíble:  su habilidad discursiva, su lenguaje corporal, su tono de voz, su humor y reflexión, su capacidad para cautivar y entretener a su audiencia, y me he propuesto ser un excelente orador como el. Esa es mi meta.

Mi sueño me ha dado la posibilidad de vivir en 5 ciudades y hacer 7 mudanzas en los últimos 11 años por mi trabajo; aprender cosas nuevas, conocer organizaciones y gente, vivir en distintos climas, pero tuve que hacer un plan y lanzarme al vacío, afrontar mis miedos.

Mi meta me dará la posibilidad de ser un mejor líder, de comunicarme con más impacto, de transformar a la gente.

Ahmed Ahmed, deportista paraolímpico, con mas medallas que Michael Phelps, lo tiene claro: Para que los sueños se hagan realidad, se tienen que hacer un plan que los convierta en metas y esa es la diferencia.

Gracias.


DISCURSO 2 PRIMERA PARTE - HAMBURGUESA Y SANDWICH

¿A quien le gustaría viajar alrededor del mundo, aquí y ahora, en este momento? Hoy los voy a invitar a viajar miles de kilómetros a través de las palabras, si, escucharon bien, através de las pa-la-bras.

Un saludo a todos, visitantes y socios de Toastmaster, agradezco la oportunidad de presentar mi segundo discurso llamado “Hamburguesa y Sandwich”.

Cada palabra tiene una historia, un alma. El lenguaje está vivo y en ese sentido, un diccionario es solo un buen intento de capturar, como una fotografía, un momento en la vida de una palabra. Las palabras nacen y mueren, al igual que nosotros, y los significados de las palabras también se transforman de vez en cuando, de lugar en lugar, de boca en boca.

Hoy haré los invito a un viaje por el mundo para 2 palabras: Hamburguesa y Sándwich

Entonces, es posible que te estés preguntando en este momento. ¿Cómo puedo viajar con una Hamburguesa y un Sándwich? Este tipo está loco, pero se los voy a probar.

Nunca he estado en Mongolia pero cada vez que como una hamburguesa recuerdo ese lugar y partir de hoy tu tal vez también lo hagas. Los caballos mongoles han sido famosos desde la época de Gengis Kan, el sanguinario líder que hace 800 años unificó las tribus nómadas del noreste de Asia y creó un imperio. Su ejército solía montar a caballo cientos de kilómetros todos los días y no acostumbraba detenerse para cocinar su comida. Los jinetes mantenían trozos de cordero debajo de las sillas de montar de sus caballos mientras cabalgaban, y cuando llegaba el momento de comer, tomaban la carne ablandada y cocinada entre la silla de montar y el lomo del caballo. El nieto de Kan invadió Moscú, Rusia en el siglo XIII y les dejó a los rusos la receta que llamaron Carne tártara o Carne de los mongoles.

300 años después, los puertos rusos comenzaron a tener relaciones comerciales con el puerto de Hamburgo localizado en  Alemania, y los lugareños de Hamburgo adoptaron felizmente esta receta de carne.

En la década de 1850, muchos marineros alemanes emigraronde Hamburgo a Nueva York y los puestos de comida atrajeron a los clientes vendiendoles bistec de Hamburgo o carne hamburguesa.

Antes de que terminara ese siglo en 189X, un héroe americano desconocido, puso el filete de hamburguesa en medio de los pedazos de pan y vualá: creó la hamburguesa que hoy conocemos. Por eso, cada vez que como una hamburguesa me acuerdo de Mongolia.

Nunca he estado en Hawaii pero cada vez que como un Sandwich recuerdo ese lugar. John Montagud tiene la culpa. Nacido en 1718 fue almirante de la flota inglesa, un aristócrata inglés, político,  jugador de cartas, fanático de la mitología griega, y también conde de Sandwich, un pequeño condado en la provincia de Kent, Inglaterra ubicado a unas 2 horas en coche desde Londres.

Como escucharon, John Montagud tenía múltiples ocupaciones y puede que sea por eso, pero John pedía mientras jugaba cartas, a la falta de una comida formal, un apetitivo rápido de preparar que le quitara el apetito. Decía, “mesero, unas tiras de carne entre dos rebanadas de pan”. Los demás jugadores, en medio de la partida, decidieron pedirle al camarero “lo mismo que el conde de Sandwich” y crearon el mito para este alimento: el Sandwich.

John Montagud, era un personaje peculiar e influyente. Cuando James Cook descubrió las islas que hoy son Hawaii en el año de 1778, las llamó islas Sandwich, en honor a John Montagud, conde de Sandwich. No fue sino hasta 1795 que las islas adoptaron el nombre de Reino de Hawaii. Por eso, cada vez que como un sándwich, me acuerdo de Hawaii.

Las palabras tienen una historia, y nos transportan al pasado, las palabras están vivas y pueden decirnos muchas cosas. Los invito a viajar por todo el mundo, así como yo, low-cost, haciéndolo a través de las palabras.


DISCURSO 2 PARTE 2. MEXICO ES LEYENDA, MISTERIO Y CONTRADICCION

(Mas fuerza y mano cerrada) Ve ahí donde enterraste el corazón de Copil y vas a ver un águila devorando una serpiente porque en tanto que dure el mundo no acabará, no terminará la gloria, la fama de México-Tenochtitlan.

 

Saludos al Toastmaster de esta noche, a todos los socios e invitados.

 

(Más velocidad) 2 millones de kilómetros cuadrados, 128.6 millones de personas, 45 millones de visitantes por año, el país con más hablantes en lengua española, líder mundial en exportación de televisiones, vehículos, frutas, y plata ¿Quién no está orgulloso de este país México?

 

Salvador Dalí declaró que México era un país más surrealista que sus pinturas. Efectivamente México es un lugar de leyenda, misterio y contradicción. Así que les narraré tres conceptos acerca del nombre de México que tal vez enriquezcan su conocimiento de este bello país.

 

Primero, México es Leyenda. Este viaje se inicia con las migraciones al Continente Americano que, según las teorías más aceptadas, ocurrieron hace unos 40 a 17 mil años, a través del estrecho de Bering, y avanzaron de norte a sur del continente americano. Si viéramos un mapa el territorio es más ancho en Estados Unidos y se vuelve más angosto en México, lo que obligó a los grupos migratorios a reunirse, intercambiar conocimientos, religión e ideas y enriquecerse. Muchas civilizaciones nacieron en la región que más tarde sería llamada Mesoamérica. Una de las tribus migratorias fueron los aztecas, quienes partieron de una tierra mítica llamada Aztlán. En su peregrinar, según dice el historiador León Portilla, una de las tribus nahuatlacas recibe un augurio: al colocar a su Dios en el hueco de un árbol, el árbol truena y se rompe por en medio, señal que los hace cambiar su nombre a mexicas. Los mexicas, un pueblo pobre y sojuzgado, que vago por varios lugares, llego a una zona pantanosa que las otras tribus no querían. Su dios principal, Huitzilopochtli, les pide que se establezcan cuando encuentran un lugar donde un águila posada sobre un nopal devore una serpiente. Tarea difícil.

Según la leyenda, en el año 1325 encontraron este lugar en el lago de Texcoco y fundaron México Tenochtitlan. Esta visión tenía muchos simbolismos. El islote representaba la Piedra Sagrada donde el Reino (o Atepetl) debía asentarse. Sobre la piedra sagrada, el cactus representaba el árbol cósmico. El fruto del árbol cósmico es la Tuna, que representa el corazón humano y la sangre, como el elixir sagrado. Finalmente el Águila representa la energía, el sol, como el Ying de tradición asiática, que lucha contra la Serpiente, la Tierra, el pecado, el Yan.

 

Segundo, México es Misterio. El significado del nombre de México es un misterio. Hay más de 20 interpretaciones por reputados investigadores nacionales y extranjeros. La que es de mi preferencia es que viene de Meztli que significa Luna, Xictli que significa ombligo o centro, y Co que significa Lugar. Meztli Xictli Co significa entonces en el centro del lago de la luna, que es como se le llamaba también al lago de Texcoco en ese entonces, recordando que fue uno de los 5 lagos que existían en lo que hoy conocemos como Ciudad de México.

 

El centro del lago de la luna…

Meztli xictli co era difícil de pronunciar para los colonos europeos por lo que el nombre se abrevió a “México”.

 

Tercero y último, México es Contradicción. La pronunciación de la palabra México tiene un secreto. Los europeos no pudieron escribir el sonido "Sh" y usaron la letra "X" debe a la falta de letra en el alfabeto español. En álgebra, la letra X es la incógnita. Pero no lo pronunciaban como una X sino como una J que era la pronunciación más cercana al “Meshico” original: “Méjico”. Eso es una contradicción lingüística en el idioma español.

 

México es tierra de Leyenda, Misterio y Contradicción, a partir de su nombre. 
Los invito a leer la historia de México, disfrutar de su riqueza cultural y estar orgullosos
 de sus símbolos.  Viva México.

DISCURSO 3 REMEDIO CONTRA LA CALVICIE

Re-me-dio para la cal-vi-cie

¿Quién no vio la cachetada que le puso Will Smith a Chris Rock en la

entrega de los premios Oscar? …

¿Y sabes por que fue?...

Por burlarse de la calvicie de la esposa de Smith.

Los calvos recibimos muchas burlas a pesar de que según un estudio de la Facultad de Medicina de la UNAM, el 28% de los hombres en México de menos de 40 años son calvos y esa cifra aumenta a mas del 40% para menores de 50 años.

Según el diccionario médico, la calvicie es la pérdida anormal de cabello.

Dejenme explicarles en que consiste: Cada hebra de cabello yace en un agujero

(cavidad) diminuto en la piel llamado folículo. El folículo se encoge con el tiempo, produciendo cabello más corto y más delgado. Finalmente, el folículo deja de formar nuevo cabello. 

Hay infinidad de remedios unos caseros y remedios de la abuelita que consisten en aceites, ungüentos y mezclas raras y otros industriales como los shampoos, uno de ellos el shampoo del tío Nacho que seguramente han escuchado. La realidad es que nada de esto funciona de largo plazo.

Hoy en exclusiva les voy a revelar un secreto para la calvicie, es una formula que no encontraran en ninguna farmacia, y lo más importante aún es que está a nuestro alcance.

Permitanme leer la receta con 7 sustancias clave:

Dopamina, la cual aconsejo tomar a diario pero con moderación porque causa adiccion

Oxitocina, sugiriendo tener en 10 dosis de 1 minuto al día

Serotonina, tomar las veces que sea necesario

Melatonina y Norpinefrina, al menos un par de veces al mes

Gaba, en pequeñas dosis con el desayuno

Endorfinas, al gusto pero cuidando la dieta

Lo que les acabo de mencionar no es posible encontrar en ninguna farmacia ni tienda de conveniencia mas cercana.

Esta receta no es sino un coctel de sustancias químicas que se producen de

manera natural en el cerebro, que viajan por el torrente sanguíneo y que sirven para enviar

mensajes hacia las neuronas, los órganos y las glándulas.

De acuerdo a varias publicaciones médicas, incluyendo el Journal of Neuroscience y AEPSAL, estas sustancias las puedes producir

haciendo las siguientes actividades:

UNO. Para la dopamina: Duerme de 7 a 9 horas, baila, celebra, recuerda momentos agradables y ve fotografías

DOS. Para producir oxitocina se generoso, medita, abraza, recibe regalos, y haz labor social

TRES: La serotonina se logra si tu Agradeces, te conectas con la naturaleza, eres optimista

CUATRO: Si tomas la luz del sol, produces melatonina.

CINCO: Cuando recibes un masaje obtienes norpinefrina.

SEIS: La Gaba se logra con Tomar decisiones, vivir el presente, y comer almendras

SIETE: Para las endorfina: Come chocolate o comida picante, goza de actividad sexual, ten pasatiempos, baila y rie.

Adicionalmente les doy otros tres consejos para producir estos neurotransmisores:

PRIMERO, Enamorate, porque eso produce grandes cantidades de dopamina, serotonina y oxitocina

SEGUNDO, Expresa gratitud, y liberarás dopamina y serotonina.

Por ultimo, Haz ejercicio, eso genera dopamina y norpinefrina

Y ustedes se preguntarán, ¿y entonces cual es el neurotransmisor que ayuda con la caída del cabello? Pues ninguno.

Pero es aquí donde quisiera compartirles una excelente conclusión: la producción de neurotransmisores te llevarán a tener una sensación de alegría, de calma; elevan tus niveles de energía, de motivación,

te dan mejor ánimo, reducen la ansiedad y el estrés, aumentan la relajación y mejoran la calidad

del sueño; en general, te dan una sensación de gozo y sin duda te pueden acompañar hacia una vida plena. No por nada algunas de ellas han sido

llamadas “hormonas de felicidad”, porque te generan una sensación de ser feliz.

Efectivamente,

el mejor re-me-dio pa-ra la cal-vi-cie

es dejar de preocuparte por la caída de pelo y

ser feliz.

DISCURSO 4 MANUEL EN EL PAIS DE LAS MARAVILLAS

Suena el despertador. Es lunes y estaba soñando con mi discurso de liderazgo de Toastmasters, pero no me quiero levantar. Así que elijo posponer la alarma otros 5 deliciosos minutos. Mientras cierro los ojos caigo y caigo y caigo por un túnel interminable junto hasta aterrizar con violencia en el País de las Maravillas.

Me levanto un poco mareado y pme regunto: ¿Quién soy? ( Recuerden esto es un sueño).

Cerca de ahí, una oruga azul fuma un puro mientras descansa sobre la rama de un árbol me mira y me dice: “No puedo ayudarte si no sabes quien eres”. “No puedo ayudarte si no sabes quien eres”.

Asustado, empiezo a correr hacia un bosque que poco a poco se llena de espejos. Veo mis reflejos, ancho, alargado, enano y gordo. Y todos los reflejos me miran y me dicen: ¿No sabes quien eres? Hace 11 años eras un contador que disfrutaba no tener contacto con la gente, y preferias trabajar en los reportes financieros, las tablas de Excel y las leyes fiscales. Pero hoy tienes 24 personas a tu cargo, 5 áreas distintas y 15 compañias. Vaya responsabilidad que me hace estar corriendo todo el tiempo.

En eso, pasa una pelota de golf zumbando y La Reina Roja me grita colérica que me quite de su camino, me empuja con su bastón y grita:

“Hace falta correr cuanto puedas para permanecer en el mismo sitio”.

“Hace falta correr cuanto puedas para permanecer en el mismo sitio”.

Intento correr para escapar de los guardias pero no avanzo nada y me atrapan, y mientras se me amontonan encima de mi entiendo que la reina tiene razón: Hay que cambiar, evolucionar solo para evitar la extinción.

He aprendido a tener mejor trato con la gente, a ser más diplomático, más empático, a tratar de ser justo. He trabajado con personas de múltiples nacionalidades, chinos, malayos, gringos, franceses, españoles, hindúes, filipinos, argentinos y también con gente de diferentes regiones, de Nuevo León, Jalisco, Baja California, CDMX, Veracruz, Michoacán, y ahora Yucatán. Y he aprendido a ajustar mi estilo a la cultura de la organización.

Muchas veces no tengo las respuestas pero entiendo que así como Alicia, A VECES confiar en la incertidumbre es lo mejor que podemos hacer, A VECES confiar en la incertidumbre es lo mejor que podemos hacer.

Me logro liberar de los guardias y me escondo en una ruidosa fiesta. Cuando los guardias se han ido veo sentado al Sombrero Loco y el me hace una seña  me invita a tomar una tazita de té para celebrar el Día del No Cumpleaños. Me siento y tomo una tazita de té y pienso que todos los asistentes no son normales y entonces entiendo que tal vez tenían un lugar en esa mesa reservado para mi: porque tampoco yo soy muy normal. Soy metodológico, pragmático, y trabajo con un objetivo a la vez, siempre busco resolver el orden y coordinar proyectos. Tal vez soy justo, algunas veces autoritario, pero que escucho todas las voces, trato de ser humano. Descubrí que podría tener mejor desempeño si hacía más fuertes a los colaboradores que trabajan en mi equipo. Así que decidí compartir todo mi conocimiento. Algunos, los menos, aprovecharon para aprender y crecer y de hecho casi en cada trabajo en el que he estado, al momento de salirme, mi mano derecha se queda con mi puesto. Excepto poruna vez una persona me dijo que ella no quería aprender y que yo era un tal por cual por buscar una manera que me fuera de vacaciones. Hoy a 15 años de distancia, ella sigue siendo estando en la misma posición y haciendo el mismo trabajo.

Sigo mi camino por el país de las maravillas buscando una salida. Un gato con una mirada de humano pasa junto a mi y sin gesticular me dice que “piensa en seis cosas imposibles antes del desayuno”, “piensa en seis cosas imposibles antes del desayuno” y DESAPARECE justo con suena la alarma y me despierto agitado y preguntando ¿soy un líder? No lo sé.

Através del cuento de Lewis Carroll, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas he querido compartir algunos detalles de mi estilo de liderazo y quisiera dejar una última lección del gato: la única forma de lograr cosas imposibles, es pensando que sean posibles, porque muchos de nuestros límites están en la mente.

¿Soy un líder? No lo s.? Pero ante el reto de serlo me pongo el saco, y ante los líderes pasados y presentes, y los lideres que aquí hoy están presentes, me quito el sombrero.


TOPIC MASTER 31-8-2022

Que harías si...
...ganaras la loteria?
...pudieras regresar al pasado?
...tuvieras una fuerza increible?
...pudieras volar?
...puedas hacerte invisible?
...tuvieras el don de la eterna juventud?
...pudieras leer la mente de otras personas?
...no tuvieras miedo?


DISCURSO 2

NIVEL 2 Dryas Iulia Moderata

7-09-2022

DISCURSO 2 NIVEL 2 Dryas Iulia Moderata

Dryas Iulia Moderata es un insecto de la familia de las

lepidopteras. Es posible encontrarlas cerca de las flores, de las cuales se alimenta, especialmente de la Passiflora auriculata y la Suriana Maritima ya que la prefieren en un 52.17% según lo refiere el estudio más reciente publicado por La Escuela Superior de Biologia. Esta especie se localiza climas húmedos, secos e intermedios, y en montañas en áreas abiertas o en la profundidad de la selva. … si, la selva que está a un lado de mi casa. La he visto cuando salgo a caminar, para que me entiendan señores, la Dryas Iulia Moderata no es otra cosa que es una simple mariposita amarilla.

Me encanta la selva. Cada que voy a caminar aprovecho

para tomar fotografías, pero nunca he podido fotografiar una mariposita amarilla. Me encanta la cadencia de su vuelo, esa suavidad, son erráticas, aletean a gran velocidad, aquí y allá;, van entre los árboles, los arbustos, y se confunden fácilmente en el ambiente y es por eso que es difícil fotografiarlas. Les comparto que hace unos días estuve a punto de lograrlo, la mariposita se poso en un tronco y cuando iba a tomar la fotografía, recogio sus alas, y se confundió con el ambiente, , así que de nuevamente me he quedado con las ganas.

Este discurso no trata de mariposas sino de

mentores, así como escuchan, de mentores: esas personas que con sus enseñanzas contribuyen en nuestra vida personal y profesional; llámenle Mister Miyagi, El Maestro Yoda, O COMO MEJOR LO CONOZCAN, que para mi son casi lo mismo que las mariposas: huidizos, y se los voy a probar, por ejemplo:

Abraham, alta capacidad de relacionarse, quería aprenderle mucho pero se cambio de compañía, así que tuve que decir adios mariposa.

Jimmy, reputado inversionista, el día que entre me dijo que luego hablamos y nunca lo volvía ver, adios mariposa

Alfredo, creía que los diamantes se hacen con presión y casi pierdo mi salud, así que adiós mariposa

Armando, platicar con el era un buen monologo ya que nunca dejaba hablar, adiós mariposa

Juan Carlos, egresado de Stanford, muy inteligente, nunca tenía tiempo, adiós mariposa.

¡Parece entonces que me he quedado 20 años

esperando que caiga del cielo un mentor1 Me pregunto ¿Acaso nadie ha influido en mi vida en 20 años? Entonces empiezo a recordar muchísimas contribuciones, unas pequeñas, otras grandes, de personas que podría considerar que fueron mentores. Viene a mi mente en este momento una de ellas: Su nombre es Eva Alfaro, psicóloga de Guadalajara, coach empresarial por muchos años. Ella me pido leer el libro “El juego interior del tenis” de Timothy Gallwey, un libro para que aprendas a jugar tenis. Gallwey dice que la mayoría de los tenistas no profesionales se frustan por no golpear bien la pelota y entre más que se concentran en su técnica peor lo hacen. El tiene dos enseñanzas que quisiera compartir con ustedes: Primero, te pide imaginarte golpeando la pelota como su fueras un espectador de ti mismo, golpeando la pelota bien, eliminando la mentalidad de falla; y segundo, te pide que te enfoques en la pelota, no en la técnica, que veas como viene la pelota y hacia donde la quieres dirigir. Eva Alfaro me recomendó este libro no para que mejorara mi nivel de tenis, que de hecho, no practico, sino para que aplicara esos conceptos deportivos en mi vida profesional: Visualízate cuando tengas un reto, haciéndolo bien; y enfócate en el objetivo, como si fuera la pelota, no importa tanto la técnica. Grandes enseñanzas para mi.

Me acuerdo de muchas historias como esa que contribuyeron a ser quien soy, son tantas que pensando bien, si cada contribución

fuera una mariposa seguramente podría llenar este lugar de mariposa. ¡Imaginenlas! Imaginen a este lugar lleno de mariposas, rojas, amarillas, azules, por todas partes, tan maravillas como maravillosas son las contribuciones y enseñanzas que he recibido en mi vida y de las cuales estoy agradecido. Así que pensando bien, con su permiso, me quedo con mis maripositas.


 

 

 

domingo, 1 de marzo de 2020

Museos

37 Museo Casa del Risco
36 Museo del Estanquillo
35 Museo Palacio de Iturbide
34 Museo del Templo Mayor
33 Museo del Perfume
32 Museo Soumaya Plaza Loreto
30Museo de Historia Natural
29Museo Nacional de la Acuarela
28Museo Mural Diego Rivera
27Museo Rufino Tamayo
26Castillo de Chapultepec
25Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo
24Casa Fuerte Indio Fernandez
23Museo Nacional de Arte
22Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera
21Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros
20Museo de Arte Moderno
19Museo Interactivo de Economia
18Museo de sitio Zona Arqueologica de Cuicuilco
17Ex Convento del Carmen
16Museo Casa Leon Trotsky
Teotihuacan
15Museo de Geología
14Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
13Acuario Inbursa
12ExConvento Desierto de los Leones
11Museo Dolores Olmedo
10Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli
9Museo de la Revolucion
8Museo de las Intervenciones
7Universum
6Museo Nacional de las Culturas Populares
5Palacio de Bellas Artes
4Papalote museo del niño
3Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia
2Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe
31Museo Jumex
1Museo Soumaya

domingo, 16 de junio de 2019

PRIVATE EQUITY



PRIVATE EQUITY

introduction to private equity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKPJ_yUwk8

DEFINITION:
Investments in public and non-public companies or assets through privately neogotiated transations.
It is an structure rather than an asset class.

Players
GENERAL PARTNERS (GP)
LIMITED PARTNERS (LP)

HOW DOES PE DRIVE VALUE CREATION?
1) Strong corporate governance model
- More information
- Implied control premium
- Operational improvements
- Vast expertise that drives revenue growth
- Creates alignment of interest
- Operates long-term horizon
- Managers are never forced to sell the company at the wrong time.

MARKET PERFORMANCE (Bloomberg investment returns 10 years ended 31-12-16)
PE outperform other investment alternatives:
Listed equity 7.42%
Fixed income 5.13%
Private equity 10.85%
Real estate 6.86%

INSTITUTIONAL ALLOCATIONS TO PE
US public pensions and university endowments have large proportions of PE.

Institutional investors
Public and private pension funds
Insurance companies
Foreign governments sovereign wealth funds
Fund-of-funds managers
Large family or multifamily offices

TYPICAL PE FUND STRUCTURE

3% to 5% from GP
Typical minimum is 10 Million USD
Typical management fee of 1..25%-2% per annum charged on commited capital
Typical performance fee (known as carried interest) is 20% of profits after fees and expenses charged at the time the investment is sold.






MECHANISM OF PE FUND

1ST YEAR - FUNDRAISING
-GP establishes limited partnership agreement setting forth the funds terms and conditions. LPA is limited partnership agreement.
- LP commit certain amout to the fund upfront during the fundraising period.

4-5TH YEARS INVESTMENT PERIOD (COMPANIES BOUGHT, REQUIRED FOR
When capital is needed for portfolio acquisitions, the GP issues requests for capital from the LP (capital calls).

DIVERSIFICATION, NO 100% OF COMMITMENT GOES INTO ONE COMPANY)

6-10 YEARS HARVEST PERIOD (COMPANIES SOLD)
Companies are sold or go public via an IPO and distributes proceeds back to the LPs.

EXIT STRATEGY
During INVESTMENT, the GP gains controlling investment in a company, the majority of which may be funded with debt.
During IMPROVEMENT, the GP increase the company's financial results and value by impelmentting operations, financial and management changes.
During EXIT, performs cash out of the investment typically through OP, trade sale to antoehr private equity firm, or a recapitalization.

J CURVE
Refers to the J shaped line that represents the cumulative net cash flows of a private equity fund during its life: negative flows during early years due to capital calls. Distributions are made after investments are exited.



PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION

Five main tools:
1.Vintage (first year a PE fund makes a portfolio investment. Affected from broad-based market movements).
2.Industry
3.Geography
5.Manager (GP's expertise and performance) The difference betwween top and bottom quartile investment managers has been 13% over the past ten years.
6. Stage (Stage of maturity)



The video also shows primary, secondary and co-investements.












lunes, 20 de mayo de 2019

How America's Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery.


1. Cerberus buys Remington. Creates a holding company on the top of the operating entity.
2. The holding company obtains a loan at 11% interest rate and buys back its equity. Cerberus recovers the invested cash. The interests are converted into loan via Pay-in-Kind notes.
3. The operating entity obtains a loan using the cash to buy the holding's company debt. This new debt does not allow the interest to be converted into loan, forcing the company to produce and sell a lot of guns to pay its obligations.
4. All the transactions rely in the ability of the operating company to produce income which was originally a positive factor but was strongly influenced by external factors such as local and federal laws and public opinion towards guns and gun control.


How America's Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery.

Original:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.html


The news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
Huntsville is a boomtown in the Southern mold. The unemployment rate is lower than the country’s, and educated workers are in high demand. Southwest of downtown, in a facility that synthesized chemical weapons during World War II, the Army maintains a major research center and garrison. Orbiting the Army base are military and aerospace contractors: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Car companies from Japan, an electronics manufacturer from Korea and many other concerns churn out goods for the domestic market. “Cutting taxes and simplifying regulations makes America the place to invest!” President Trump tweeted in January 2018; he was talking about Huntsville.
Since 1993, when the state gave Mercedes-Benz $253 million to build its first American auto plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama has refashioned itself as a kind of foundry for the rest of the country and the world, first courting automakers and then becoming an all-purpose workshop and technology hub. Airbus produces A320 jetliners; Toyota makes engines for Rav4s and Tundras; Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s “spacefaring” company, recently broke ground on a rocket-engine plant. These companies are drawn here partly by the benefits that Trump cited, but most forcefully by the generous tax-incentive packages doled out by officials in Montgomery, the state capital, in concert with pro-business mayors.
Huntsvillians take pride in their economy, and when a new company comes to town, good will cascades toward it. In early 2015, wearing a shirt and hat from Remington could even score you the best table at a restaurant. In the display cases at Larry’s Pistol and Pawn, Huntsville’s most respected gun shop, managers made room for Remington pistols stamped with “Huntsville, AL”: It was a point of pride to carry a weapon made in-state. “Locked and Loaded,” ran the headline in The Huntsville Times, for an article describing how the factory would ultimately create more than 1,800 jobs.
Doors opened in spring 2015. News from the inside was scarce, but this was more or less to be expected. Workers in the gun industry endure a special kind of scrutiny, like metal detectors at the exits and visits to their homes from A.T.F. agents looking for weapons that have gone missing. When Remington forbade employees to speak to outsiders about their jobs or fired a person who removed a smartphone from his pocket in the vicinity of the line, the explanation was assumed to be that the company was protecting its secrets, including the pace of its production. “Those assault rifles,” one employee told me, “they couldn’t make them fast enough.” That year, Remington earned $191 million in gross profit on $809 million of revenue.
At the top of the employees’ checks, the name “Remington Arms” was printed, along with the address of the company’s new facility at 1816 Remington Circle SW in Huntsville. But this was somewhat misleading. While the guns were still stamped with the thick-footed Remington R, the company no longer existed as a fully independent entity. Seven years before Remington came to Huntsville, it was purchased, at a relative bargain, by a private-equity firm that controlled tens of billions of dollars from its offices in Manhattan.
The firm, Cerberus Capital Management, takes its name from the three-headed, dragon-tailed dog who, in Greek mythology, stands guard at the gates of Hades.

A Remington assembly room in 1917. Bettmann/Getty Images
Stephen Feinberg, co-founder and chief executive of Cerberus, came of age alongside his field. He was born in the Bronx, N.Y., in 1960, went to Princeton, where he studied politics, then after graduation, took a job at the brokerage house Drexel Burnham Lambert. As the journalist Connie Bruck recounted in her 1988 best seller, “The Predators’ Ball,” Drexel was a feral place in the early ’80s. Under the direction of its star financier, Michael Milken, the firm developed a way to help clients purchase whole companies using high-interest loans — a practice mainstream investment banks found far too risky to imitate. Milken could whip together nine figures for a client just by picking up the phone. The client took the borrowed cash, bought an obscure or struggling company, and tried either to renovate it or to stamp out costs — often through layoffs — and make it profitable. When these so-called “leveraged buyouts” worked, investors made a hundred or a thousand times their money. When they failed, the bought-out businesses crumbled.
Milken made hundreds of millions of dollars from the fees he earned on leveraged buyouts. At Drexel’s parties at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Milken would unleash his male clients on a bungalow filled with what Bruck referred to as “extremely attractive young women” the firm had paid to be there. His career came to an abrupt halt in 1990, when he was convicted of securities fraud and was permanently banned from the stock market. (Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury, has reportedly lobbied Trump to pardon Milken.)
Milken’s conviction coincided with the declining popularity of the term “leveraged buyout.” In the winter of 1988, the acquisition of R.J.R. Nabisco by a firm called KKR — one of the most televised news stories of the year — had taken the opaque practice directly into people’s kitchens and cigarette packs, where it turned out to be threatening and unwelcome. In 1990, Susan Faludi at The Wall Street Journal wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a Safeway trucker in Dallas who worked for the supermarket chain for nearly 30 years, lost his job after KKR acquired it and shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle. The way people in 2008 talked about “credit default swaps” as a symbol of Wall Street lunacy, people in the early 1990s talked about leveraged buyouts. Faced with all this bad publicity, Wall Street decided it had only one option. It would have to change the name. Stephen Feinberg founded Cerberus in 1992 as the euphemism “private equity” was coming into currency.
If Feinberg resembles Milken, it’s in superficial ways. Milken cultivated a “blue-collar billionaire” persona, speaking brashly and wearing jeans and loafers; Feinberg wore off-the-rack suits to his gray, dingy offices in New York. The young Milken would take a predawn bus from New Jersey to the Drexel offices in New York City while reading regulatory filings with a flashlight; when researching a deal, Feinberg is said to establish “war rooms” at his office and keep his staff until midnight or later. According to Bruck’s book, Milken seldom granted interviews, because “you can’t make a dime off publicity”; Feinberg is reported to have joked to a private meeting of his investors in 2007 that “if anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper, and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.” (Feinberg declined to comment for this article.)

Milken financed leveraged buyouts, but Feinberg made his name by investing directly in distressed assets, businesses that were in bad shape financially. His deal to acquire the parent company of National Car Rental is emblematic of his shrewdness. In 2003, the company was bankrupt, and Feinberg bought it for just $230 million. In four years, he realigned it toward the airport market, then sold it to Enterprise Rent-A-Car for $3 billion. During the rest of the ’00s, the firm expanded to mortgage lenders, real estate, department stores, automakers: anywhere it saw an inefficiency it could exploit. The industry had matured, too. No longer executing leveraged buyouts exclusively, private-equity firms had a host of investment strategies at their disposal. Twenty-seven years after Feinberg founded it, Cerberus was managing $39 billion.
Because private-equity firms appear frequently as villains in the press, many people assume that they cater mostly to the superrich, earning high returns on investments for billionaire clients. They do. But by far the most important piece of their business — 48 percent, according to the data-analytics firm Preqin — is investing capital for American pension funds. Beginning in the 1990s, pension managers and unions could see that when the baby-boom generation retired, there would be shortfalls between what the funds were obligated to pay out and the money they had — the so-called pension gap. An investment strategy that could return 15 to 20 percent a year and close that gap was an irresistible solution. The pension fund for the Boston-area public water utility invests in Cerberus. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, CalSTRS, is a Cerberus client, as is a pension fund for the Presbyterian Church as well as many university endowments, sovereign wealth funds and philanthropic foundations.
Private-equity buyouts are associated in the public imagination with layoffs, but the research on that topic isn’t conclusive. Private-equity-owned firms don’t necessarily occasion more layoffs than publicly traded ones, but some studies suggest that private-equity firms may be responsible for increased polarization in the job market, that is, for eliminating midlevel roles and thereby contributing to the shrinking of the middle class. A company purchased by private equity can expect to be realigned aggressively, in a five- or 10-year window, to become more “efficient,” which often entails firing, automation and offshoring. For a pension fund, then, and especially the pension fund of a union, investing in private equity can be a devil’s bargain: helping retiring workers by using tools that may harm younger ones.
When Cerberus bought Remington in 2007, the world was hurtling through the greatest rush of private-equity acquisitions in history. From 2002 to the crash in 2008, hundreds of billions of dollars a year were deployed in private-equity deals by firms like Cerberus, KKR and Blackstone. There were never fewer than 1,700 private-equity transactions annually; in 2007 the figure peaked at 7,400. After the crash briefly interrupted its momentum, the industry came back in force. The United States government was responding to the crisis by lowering borrowing costs to kick-start the economy. For private-equity firms, the access to cheap debt was a gift: It allowed them to purchase a long list of targets, then borrow more money using those targets as collateral. During the recovery, private-equity firms made an average of one trillion dollars’ worth of acquisitions every year. In 2017 there were a record 9,500 deals. By 2019, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, the industry controlled $3.4 trillion in assets globally. If private equity were a country, it would be the fifth-largest economy on earth, beating India, Britain and France.
Tommy Battle, the mayor of Huntsville, is a hefty man who speaks in a baritone and wins ribbons at amateur barbecue cook-offs. In his office on the eighth floor of Huntsville’s City Hall, he has a plaque from Mazda and Toyota that looks like a pro-wrestling belt, a blue-tipped shovel with Facebook printed on the head and a long-barreled Remington rifle mounted on a wooden board. Each commemorates the opening of a factory or an office that Battle helped entice to move to Huntsville, mostly using tax incentives.
Battle was re-elected in 2016 with 80 percent of the vote. His popularity springs from his ability to generate jobs — and to generate headlines about generating jobs. Though his endorsement of Roy Moore, who lost his bid for a seat in the United States Senate amid sexual-assault accusations, alienated some Huntsvillians — northern Alabamians consider themselves more socially liberal than their southern neighbors — Battle is mostly beloved by his constituents. When I met him in his office, his business-relations officer leaned over my recorder on the table and said, “If Amazon Web Services is reading right now, tell them we’d love to have a data center.”
In 2013, Battle learned that a site-selection consultant, someone who helps businesses looking to expand or relocate, was sniffing around the South on behalf of an unnamed manufacturer. The consultant, Michael Press, was an old hand in the tax-incentive game. In the 1980s, advising the New York City mayor Ed Koch, he wrote many of the incentives that Amazon recently claimed in its ill-fated bid to build a headquarters in Long Island City. When Press was hired to find a Remington factory, he did what he always did, sending letters to multiple states soliciting bids, inciting competition without disclosing his client. Press had learned that if workers at a company’s existing plants heard a new one was being sought, they would panic about the impending layoffs.
By choosing to place Remington in a Southern state, Press was acknowledging how much the gun business had transformed. Historically, gun makers operated in the North, in New England’s “Gun Valley” or, like Remington, in upstate New York. Smith & Wesson and Colt were established in the 1850s by businessmen in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. During the Civil War, arsenals in Massachusetts furnished huge quantities of firearms to the Union Army. But social mores had changed. The year that Michael Press sent his letters, New York passed the SAFE Act, one of the nation’s most stringent gun-control measures. Battle summarized to me the message the law sent to gunmakers: “If you like guns,” he said, “then you need to go somewhere else.”
There was a secondary benefit. Composed entirely of “right to work” states, the South allowed employees in unionized shops to opt out of paying dues, effectively guaranteeing that any union encountered by Remington would be worse-funded, and therefore less powerful, than a counterpart in the North. At Remington’s factory in Ilion, N.Y., employees had health care and long-term contracts thanks to the United Mine Workers of America. They were difficult to fire, and they stuck together. In some cases, multiple generations of men in the same family had worked on the line. “That union,” a former Remington executive told me disdainfully, “had them by the balls.”

The Remington plant in Ilion, N.Y. Mike Groll/Associated Press
If Press had every reason to send his client south, though, he lacked any special affection for Huntsville. For one thing, he explained to me, the airport had a shortage of worthwhile direct flights. For another, the technical labor pool was limited compared with those of larger cities. Press fine-tuned his list, disclosed the name of his client, and flew to Huntsville for a series of meetings, still skeptical. Across the table sat Battle, the head of the Chamber of Commerce and the state’s economic-development director. They flipped their cards one by one. The governor’s office would give Remington a significant abatement of their income tax for 10 years. The Tennessee Valley Authority would provide discounted electricity. Alabama Industrial Development Training, a state agency, would train Remington’s workers free, as it had done for 800,000 others at big-name companies in Alabama, like Boeing, Raytheon and Mercedes.
Then Battle flipped the fourth ace: He agreed to purchase and renovate the former Chrysler factory in Huntsville for $12.5 million and give it to Remington rent-free. Press could scarcely believe his good fortune. “It is hard to think of a deal that is better than the Remington deal from the perspective of the company,” he told me. “And I’ve done easily 200.”

In exchange for tens of millions in incentives, Remington had only to commit to a few terms, laid out in a fat document called a development agreement. First, it had to hire enough employees every year so that, in 2021, it would have a local work force of 1,868. Second, starting immediately, it had to pay those employees a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50, rising to $20.19 in 2017. All parties signed.
Private-equity firms typically replace existing managers and install handpicked lieutenants. At Remington, George Kollitides was made chief executive in 2012. A Cerberus managing director until that year, Kollitides was a private-equity star and a fixture in New York philanthropy circles. He received his M.B.A. from Columbia in the late 1990s and, like Feinberg, was a firearms enthusiast. (Kollitides declined to comment for this article.)
Kollitides spent much of 2013 and 2014 zigzagging across the country in Remington’s Piaggio turboprop. Handsome and charming, he persuaded a number of sought-after executives to relocate to Huntsville. “George picked me up in the plane in New Hampshire,” said Ginger Chandler, a former Smith & Wesson executive who served as senior vice president of new-product development at Remington from 2014 to 2017. “He brought me to Huntsville, and he showed me the engineering lab,” she said. “That’s how he convinced me. For an engineer in the gun industry, these facilities were superior to everyone else’s, except maybe Sig Sauer’s. George convinced me that they had a dream in Huntsville, and I believed him.”
The dream was lofty and ambitious, and Huntsville was only a piece of it. Cerberus had been trying for years to assemble a dominant American gun company. First, in 2006, it purchased Bushmaster, known for its AR-15-style rifles. Then it paid $118 million in cash for Remington and assumed the company’s debt. Other acquisitions followed, until by 2013, 18 businesses were rolled up together under Cerberus’s roof. One of Kollitides’s jobs was to oversee the necessary layoffs. In Ilion, where Remington has operated for 191 years on the same site — unfinished weapons had to travel from one brick building to the next — 231 people lost their jobs. There were 160 layoffs at Montana Rifleman in Kalispell, Mont. The Advanced Armament Corporation, a manufacturer of suppressors and silencers, closed its plant in Georgia, and 68 people were let go from D.P.M.S. Panther Arms in St. Cloud, Minn.; 65 from Para USA in Pineville, N.C. What remained was to increase profit margins by combining all these scattered production lines into a single megafactory.
As Chandler flew with Kollitides on the plane from New Hampshire, there was every indication that success awaited them below. When Cerberus bought Remington, the company was earning $500 million a year in revenue. In 2014, it earned $939 million. Guns sales are driven by anti-gun rhetoric; a popular joke in the industry is that Barack Obama was the greatest gun salesman of all time. The numbers bear this out. In 2013, the year following his second electoral victory, American gun companies produced 10,844,792 firearms, 222 percent more than they produced in the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2015, expecting another Democrat in the White House, many manufacturers thought the party would continue, stoked by a combination of gun-control rhetoric and the right-wing media’s confiscation conspiracies.
There was, however, a hidden, vaguely mysterious quirk of the company’s finances. In 2012, more or less in the middle of the best climate for gun makers in a generation, America’s oldest continually operating manufacturer abruptly, and for no easily discernible reason, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars. When the company came to Alabama, it owed $828 million to its creditors. While this number, compared with the company’s earnings, represented a comfortable ratio on the balance sheet, it was nonetheless curious. The debt could conceivably have been explained by the cost of opening a new factory were it not for the fact that Remington got its factory free.
Last fall, a former Remington executive, who asked that his name not be used for fear of a backlash, opened the door to his house in Huntsville and beckoned me into his study, where we sat on either side of a fireplace. A four-volume edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” bound in dark green leather sat on the mantle, next to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a copy of the United States Constitution.
I had met the executive in a bar in Huntsville, where I was looking for a different Remington executive, one who ultimately refused an interview because I couldn’t satisfy his condition of getting a prominent American war journalist to send him a personal email. This one told me he would talk if I showed up at his house the next morning with a Dunkin’ Donuts pumpkin latte, which I now set in front of him on his Oriental rug.
He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online, and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions. The business was, according to him, “in shambles.” It seemed that the companies Cerberus had moved to Alabama had been “bought and forgot.” He explained that he was “a realist” about business, a game in which not everyone gets “a shiny rose at the end,” but even so he sensed that something had gone deeply wrong. Executives were fired at a fast clip. Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing. “The decisions were all about: Where can I save another dime?” he told me.
Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville factory. According to him, Cerberus had made “hundreds of millions of dollars” almost immediately. “They pulled out all that money up front, took as much cash as they could.”
“How?” I said.
He squinted cryptically. “They get their money.”
I realized he didn’t know. I went back and reread Remington’s public filings. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in 2012. What wasn’t clear was where the money went. I showed the filings to a professor of finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to itself. “Seems like they did something stupid,” he said. “But that can’t be right, because they’re not stupid.”

I asked Gustavo Schwed, a professor of private equity at New York University who spent 24 years in the industry, to help me review the documents. Schwed pored over the many years of financial data and located two separate debt transactions, one of which was so esoteric I would never even have known to look for it. Together, these transactions explained not just the mysterious 2012 loan but, indirectly, the way the deal finally unraveled.
In order to buy Remington, Cerberus, as most private-equity firms would, created a new entity, a holding company. Instead of Cerberus buying a gun company, Cerberus put money into the holding company, and the holding company bought Remington. The entities were related but — and this was crucial — each could borrow money independently. In 2010, Cerberus had the holding company borrow $225 million from an undisclosed group of lenders, most likely hedge funds. Because this loan was risky — the lenders would be paid only if Remington made a lot of money or was sold — the holding company offered a generous interest rate of around 11 percent, much higher than a typical corporate loan. When the interest payments were due, the holding company paid them not in cash but with paid-in-kind notes, that is, with more debt. These are known as PIK notes.
The holding company now had $225 million in borrowed cash. Cerberus, meanwhile, owned most of the shares of the holding company’s stock, basically slips of paper they acquired when they created the holding company. The handoff happened next: The holding company spent most of the $225 million buying back its own stock, effectively transferring all the borrowed cash to Cerberus. Cerberus would keep that money no matter what. Meanwhile Remington continued rolling along as though nothing had happened, because Remington itself was not responsible for the holding company’s debt. Remington was just an “operating company” that the holding company owned, something that allowed the holding company to borrow money, the way you would take a necklace to a pawnshop. These were garden-variety maneuvers in a private-equity buyout. In the trade, this is called “financial engineering.” People get degrees in it.
In April 2012, Cerberus did something fateful, which probably seemed smart at the time. It had Remington borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to buy the holding company’s debt, effectively transferring responsibility for the principal and the interest payments onto Remington. America’s oldest gun company now owed the money that Cerberus had used to pay itself back for having bought the company in the first place. There were plenty of sensible reasons to do this. Gun sales were high, and the debt that Remington took out was cheaper to service than the paid-in-kind debt.
But there was a catch. Because the operating company borrowed the money with a normal loan — and not with PIK notes — interest payments were required in cash. Suddenly Remington was carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that, if it could not be paid, would cause the business to go bankrupt.
By the time the factory opened in Huntsville, the various players stood in vastly different positions. The private-equity firm had made back its initial investment and was playing with house money. Remington owed hundreds of millions that it hadn’t borrowed. And its workers, urgently, had to make a lot of guns.
Huntsville is a de facto segregated city. Pastor T.C. Johnson, of St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church, recounted to me how while he was in the Army in the early 1990s, real estate agents didn’t show him houses in South Huntsville, the white side of town. He was unaware South Huntsville existed until some of his Army subordinates, who were white, bought homes there. Since 1965 Huntsville’s schools have been under a federal desegregation order, which compels school districts to remedy race-based inequality. Johnson’s oldest son attended Mae Jemison High, a predominantly black school that the state classified as failing. White students at nearby schools “were so far ahead of my child it was almost sickening,” he said.
Johnson’s experience was of a piece with the racial hierarchy in Huntsville. Blacks make up 31 percent of the city’s population but make up 16 percent of its police force. Unlike Birmingham and Mobile, there has never been a black mayor in Huntsville. Though blacks, like all Huntsvillians, paid the taxes that supported lucrative incentive packages, they seldom reaped the rewards of the best-paying jobs. This reality was of course not felt by whites, Johnson said. For whites, “that’s just the way it is.”
The Remington factory was housed in a gray building the size of 14 football fields set back behind fencing topped with razor wire. Inside, the building was divided in half, the production line on the left and the administrative and engineering offices on the right, along with a classroom set up by the state agency that provides free worker training for private businesses. Classes for new hires were held three days a week, every week.
About a year after the factory opened, leaders in Huntsville’s black community, including Johnson, began to hear reports from inside. Johnson was disappointed but not surprised to learn from his parishioners that on the Remington line, the usual racial divisions manifested. Most of the line workers were black, whereas most of the managers and engineers were white. Though the company was supposed to be hiring hundreds of people, workers said that the line appeared suspiciously sparse. In addition, though the jobs had been advertised at $19.50 an hour in newspaper columns and Facebook posts — as they should have been, per the development agreement — no one seemed to be earning anything close to $19.50. Johnson, along with the president of the Huntsville N.A.A.C.P. chapter at the time, the Rev. Robert Shanklin, invited a union organizer from the United Mine Workers of America, the same union that organized Remington’s Ilion plant, to use its church facilities and offices as necessary in order to hold clandestine meetings.
The organizer arrived in Huntsville in 2016. He was born in Birmingham and spent most of his career organizing throughout the South. As a result, he tended to be suspicious of Southern bosses — “I have a warped mind when it comes to Alabama,” he told me — and he expected an oppositional management at Remington. But another obstacle surprised him. From week to week, in Johnson’s church or Shanklin’s N.A.A.C.P. office, the organizer rarely saw the same face twice. It seemed to Shanklin that in order to prevent unionization, the factory was exchanging its full-time workers for temps, who came and went rapidly, never sticking around long enough to have a stake. (Remington declined to comment for this article.)

The presence of the temp workers, who were exempt from the minimum average hourly wage in the development agreement, also served as a cautionary tale, a reminder of how much lower you could sink if you raised trouble. Temps started at $9.20 an hour with no benefits. Full-time workers, for their part, were often unaware that the tax-incentive package might entitle them to higher wages than they were receiving. And when they did realize, they were unsure what to do.
While I was in Huntsville, Remington employees told me that if they spoke to me for this article, they would be fired. One woman, a line worker, told me over the phone: “These people, they have ways of finding out if you talked. I talk to you, no ifs, ands or buts, I’m gone. It makes us feel they have something to hide. But we keep our mouths shut. Clock in, clock out.”
I eventually met a former employee, who asked to be identified by her first initial, D., and agreed to talk about her experience at Remington. D. started working full time on the Remington line in August 2015. She was 43 and divorced and moved to Alabama more than a decade earlier from Michigan, along with her 17-year-old son. In 2014 she was earning $10 an hour as a housekeeper at a hospital, but she left for a job at Remington after seeing a newspaper article in which the company promised a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50.
After taking her two-week course at A.I.D.T., D. started work. She was assigned to a boxing station, which was not on an assembly line but at a static counter where the workers stood side by side. The job was boring. She received the guns — they were long guns, for hunting — placed them in boxes, then weighed the boxes on a digital scale. If the scale displayed a red light, that meant D. had missed a part. When she opened her first paycheck, she saw that she was earning $12.36 an hour — gross. After taxes and benefits, her take-home pay amounted to $353.70 a week.
After two years, according to paystubs that D. shared with me, she was earning $14.16 an hour. She decided to move into a better apartment in North Huntsville, a two-bedroom with a linoleum square cut out of gray carpeting for a welcome mat. Rent was $675. She bought a Dodge Avenger and a Ruger .380 for protection.
Then, in 2016, D. slipped on a metal pole that a maintenance worker had left outside the factory, grabbed the fence with her right hand to break her fall and felt a muscle tear in her wrist. After missing several days for a second surgery, she says she was called into the office of her supervisor, told that she had missed too much work and fired, three years to the day after she started. As the union effort had fizzled, there was no one she could appeal to for help.
We were sitting in her apartment last October when her cellphone rang. “Tracir Financial’s calling,” she said. “’Cause I owe on the car.” She pressed decline. The fingers of her left hand returned to her right wrist and massaged it.
Over the winter, facing several months of back rent and payments on the Dodge, D. ran out of cash. One morning she woke up to find her car had been repossessed. Bankruptcy offered the only way out, and she filed her petition three weeks before Christmas. Just before the New Year, she was hired by the private-security firm Securitas. She was assigned to the Toyota factory. For the first hour of the day, she would stand outside in her jacket and check employees’ IDs as they arrived. Then she patrolled the parking lot in a company car. The job pays $10 an hour.
After the 2016 election, researchers at Cerberus saw an omen in their data. Applications through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which are known as “NIC checks,” were dropping by double-digit percentages. A plunge in NIC checks foreshadows a corresponding plunge in gun sales, which is what happened in the months that followed. Remington’s profit slid toward zero. The debt, meanwhile, was racing upward, like a flame licking a fuse.
For Cerberus’s executives, the predicament was like being bitten by a trusted pet. Cerberus has a habit of hiring power brokers from the United States government, many of them prominent Republicans. The former vice president Dan Quayle became chairman of Cerberus Global Investments in 1999; the former Treasury secretary John W. Snow joined Cerberus seven years later. The Republican donor William Richter is a founder. Since May 2018, Feinberg has been a member of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent entity created to advise the president on national-security matters. But if Obama was the best, Trump was proving to be the worst gun salesman of all time. Magnifying his negative impact, gun makers had already ramped up production ahead of Hillary Clinton’s expected victory: In 2017 the market was choked with surplus product, and Trump’s Second Amendment enthusiasm was dousing any hope of a panic buy.
Remington executives arranged a meeting with their creditors. They calmly explained the situation. Remington had been loaded with debt; now it couldn’t pay the interest. After listening politely, the banks made a proposal: They would exchange the money they were owed for an ownership stake in Remington, a so-called Chapter 11 bankruptcy or “debt-for-equity swap.” This arrangement would allow Remington to stay running, albeit under distant ownership, until a plan could be drawn up for its future, such as a sale or a liquidation of assets.
In March, Remington announced that it would lay off about 200 employees between its Ilion and Huntsville factories. Shortly after that, the state of Alabama, in a routine payroll audit, found that Remington had missed its hiring targets: Only 450 people were working at the plant at the beginning of 2018, as opposed to the 680 promised in the development agreement. In response, the county and state revoked a number of their tax incentives and demanded the return of $500,000. Remington, not Cerberus, will be responsible for the sum. By the time the state finished its audit, the private-equity firm had long since exited the scene.
A source told me that Cerberus executives were disappointed in the way the Remington transaction turned out; you never want your companies to end up in bankruptcy. Even so, for the firm, at least, the decade-long saga had been profitable.
Jesse Barron is a writer in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about investors’ attempts to profit from climate change.