Hit by the Spanish king of spam in the week of GDPR

Maltese politicians and CEOs get a twice-daily dose of spam king’s political drivel

Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort brags that he has been able to flood the mailboxes of almost 12 million professionals, by his own account.
Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort brags that he has been able to flood the mailboxes of almost 12 million professionals, by his own account.

Nigerian princes and gold bullion scams are redolent of an innocent age of email spam. But when your name crops up among Malta’s great and good to join a “presidential team” by none other than spam king ‘J.P. Monfort’, you know you’ve landed in the pantheon of spam artists.

This being just weeks since the big inbox clean-up brought over by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, nothing could be more fortuitous.

“We have invited you to join the presidential team in your country,” Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort writes in an email from his base in Albania. The industrious Spaniard says he is setting up 200 such think-tanks manned by “top notch experts”, in an email that comes with rendered images of people like former minister Michael Frendo, former University rector Juanito Camilleri and EU Court judge Peter Xuereb, who have not consented to become members of this policy-making team.

Spammed... these people's images are being used without their consent
Spammed... these people's images are being used without their consent

This is first-class bullshit, delivered to an impressive list of academics, journalists, lawyers and politicians by the king of spam.

Some of the people in this long list are requesting to be delisted already, hoping that Monfort is pliable under GDPR threats.

But Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort brags that he has been able to flood the mailboxes of almost 12 million professionals, by his own account. “My name is Jaime P. Monfort, author and social entrepreneur, prepared from exile a coup to the Establishment in Spain to end once and for all with the impoverished situation of misgovernment.”

In his Malta email, he invites his victims to join his multidisciplinary team to “construct creative, imaginative, prospective and analytical policymaking proposals… Congratulations on the nomination to join your country’s most prestigious team, you are one of your country’s best experts and a potential crew member in the world’s most revolutionary journey towards the best possible future, a borderless World of Eutopia and Cornucopia.”

His CV boasts the most industrious of academic records: since 1994, 10 degrees, from a Master’s in telecommunications from Madrid polytechnic, and degrees in financial analysis and financial engineering from Madrid and Berkeley, and degrees from the LSE, Columbia University, Georgetown, and now undertaking a Master’s in global diplomacy at SOAS in London – simultaneously studying for a Master’s in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

His ‘Monfort Plan’ claims to have devised a solution to “lessen the burden of poverty” through “creative policymaking”, and says he is fluent in English, French, German and Spanish, as well as working knowledge of Albanian, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.

One person who actually met him was none other than the former Spanish minister and president of the European Parliament Josep Borrell, who suggests that Monfort is “an unbalanced person who needs psychiatric help” – but not a fraud.

As president of the University Institute of Florence, Borrell gave Monfort a letter of recommendation for a scholarship, but was turned down by the corresponding US university.

When Borrell refused to give him another letter of recommendation, Monfort began harassing him with emails.

In one of his videos, amateurish productions in which Monfort is seen talking about his ‘Monfort plan’ with the most unusual of backgrounds (one of them looks like the shower of an outdoor swimming pool), he claims to have sent emails to 16,000 professionals in Argentina, 20 of whom answered back.

So far, some Maltese recipients have asked Monfort to delist them from his list although it will be a hard feat for them. Now based in Albania, the Spanish spammer’s visions for a “global party” and a think-tank gathering world experts to solve global ills, seem unstoppable.