Dana White, explaining Zuffa’s
recent axing of Alistair Overeem, Valentijn Overeem,
Marloes Coenen, and Jon Olav Einemo:
“This is actually a pretty
simple explanation. If you look back throughout history, we haven’t
had any Golden Glory guys fight with us since Semmy Schilt, right?
And the reason is we have very different business practices. It’s
tough to do business with them. The bottom line is the way they do
business is, you have to pay them, not the fighters. We don’t work
that way. It’s not the way we do business. It’s not how it works in
the United States with the athletic commissions. You don’t pay the
managers and the managers pay the fighters. You pay the fighters
and the fighters pay the managers…The reality is, we’re trying to
work out deals with these guys and they won’t do it. They said you
absolutely can’t pay the fighters, you have to pay us. And it’s
pretty simple to look back and see that the last guy who fought in
UFC was Semmy Schilt. There was a reason for that.”
Marloes
Coenen, calling
“bullshit” last night:
“@danawhite hurts me 2 hear things about my management that are not
true. #Ibelieveinthetruth #proof http://twitpic.com/6113vq”
The check-stub image shows $37,506 being paid directly to Coenen by
Forza, LLC — the Zuffa subsidiary that purchased Strikeforce —
clearly contradicting White’s explanation about why the Golden
Glory fighters were cut. So now we’re back at the original, more
logicial explanation: Alistair Overeem was released because he
didn’t play ball to a sufficient degree, and his teammates were cut
to emphasize that point, pretty much out of spite. Sound about
right?
Of course, Marloes Coenen airing proof of her salary opens up
another can of worms entirely. While she cleared a respectable
$37,500 for her final effort in Strikeforce, that figure doesn’t
come close to matching up with her previous reported salaries,
which were officially $10,000, $3,000,
and $2,000 for
her last three performances. We’ve always assumed that some
international fighters were paid the majority of their purses off
the books in order to avoid being taxed in two different countries,
but this seems to confirm it. Will this incident lead to closer
speculation about Strikeforce’s financial practices — and could it
spell the end of unreported tax-dodging for other international
fighters?