Sergey Mavrodi, founder of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox, MMM, has written an open letter to the Nigerian government to justify the importance of the popular Ponzi scheme.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the letter was displayed on the page of all participants of the scheme.
Mavrodi warned the federal government that if the Ponzi scheme collapses, millions of Nigerians will suffer, noting that “MMM is their only means of livelihood”.
He stated that the money being made from the scheme was being redistributed among Nigerians as a way of “restoring social justice”.
The letter reads in part: “So far MMM has come under a constant attack from you. In this regard, I would like to ask you a few simple questions. Since you are concerned with the interests of millions of your fellow citizens, I hope that you would be so kind to answer them.
“What are you trying to get? Do you want the MMM System to collapse and millions of people to suffer? Who will support them then if now MMM is their only means of livelihood? Will you? You even don’t pay wages to people? Or might you not care about them? Might you be using a trendy topic to make a good name for yourselves? What will you say to a mother who will have no money to buy food for her child? Will you let her child die for the sake of the higher interests of the economy?
“You say that MMM is a scam. What is the scam here, if all members are warned in advance about all the risks, the possible and impossible ones? They know there are no investments at all. The warning is a red text on a yellow background placed on most prominent place of the website.
“You say that MMM is bad. Why? Yes, it produces nothing, but nothing gets out of the country either. The money is just redistributed among the citizens of Nigeria. It gets from those who are richer to poorer ones, in this way restoring social justice. What’s wrong with that?
“You have repeatedly stated that “it should be investigated!.. researched!..” It means you know nothing about this System yet; you even haven’t understood how it works.
“And finally. If you know what is right for people, why is the life so bad in the country?”
He further noted that the MMM “has been working in Nigeria for a year, and according to your estimates, the total number of members now is about 3 million people”.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have, at several times, warned Nigerians against participating in the scheme while the house of representatives also ordered an investigation into the operation of the scheme, in October.
According to Wikipedia, МММ was a Russian company that perpetrated one of the world’s largest Ponzi schemes of all time, in the 1990s. By different estimates from 5 to 40 million people lost up to $10 billion. The exact figures are not known even to the founders.
MMM took its name from its founder, Mavrodi. He founded MMM in 1989 and the scheme was declared bankrupt three years later leading to the disappearance of Mavrodi until his arrest in 2003.
He was convicted in 2007 in his home country of defrauding 10,000 investors out of 110 million rubles, the equivalent of $4.3 million. MMM is not his first ‘wonder bank’ creation.
MMM collapsed in Zimbabwe in September 2016 leaving thousands of people, among them civil servants and vendors, with thousands of dollars trapped in the ponzi scheme.
Additional reports by the News Agency of Nigeria
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