"Mix Diskerud, the U.S. national team midfielder, is reportedly close to signing for Club Tijuana of Mexico's Liga MX, where he'd join fellow U.S. internationals Joe Corona and Greg Garza. [Update: ESPN spoke with Diskerud. He said he will not be signing with a Mexican team.]
Diskerud's contract with his current club, Norway's Rosenborg, is over at the end of the month, and he's free to sign wherever he wants. If he ends up south of the border, it'd be an interesting move for the Norwegian-American. Over the last couple of years, he's taken a hard look at MLS and balked twice. The most recent round of negotiations broke down when his dad Paul, who is also his agent, demanded a last-second pay hike. One wonders what kind of money the Xolos are throwing at Diskerud. It must be a pretty good deal. As MLS discovered, Paul is no novice negotiator, and he's certainly not afraid to squeeze people out of a couple bucks.
In Norway, Paul Diskerud is under investigation by the Finanstilsynet (The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway) under penal code §295, which forbids usury. Usury is fancy speak for loan sharking. Diskerud is alleged to be one of Norways biggest loan sharks, accused of screwing people out of millions of dollars through illegal, unregulated loans that carry interest rates as high as 133 percent.
The Finanstilsynet investigation comes in the wake of a bombshell, 8,000-word report published in November by Norwegian journalists Knut Gjernes and Gøran Skaalmo in the financial magazine Dagens Næringsliv. (Dagens Næringsliv was one of the organizations that published Wikileaks documents in 2010.)
As described by Gjernes and Skaalmo, Diskerud's alleged loan sharking works in a number of different ways, but his modus operandi goes something like this: somebody needs quick money, to pay for their home, say, or to save their business—it could be anything. But they need it now, faster than they can get it from a bank, what with all the paperwork and bureaucracy.
Diskerud is reportedly the kind of dude who can produce lots of money, millions of dollars, fast. Because he's not a licensed lender in Norway, the loan deals aren't classic repayment schemes; they're hidden behind fake transactions or intermediaries—and they're illegal. In some cases, he's accused of taking houses for collateral; in others, he's accepted valuable works of art or company stock. Often, the collateral is "purchased" at low valuation with an agreement to buy it back later at a much higher price." |