Hello everybody, As you are aware, we started working with AMESOL (Mexican Free Software Enterpresarial Association, roughly) around October in order for them to become our umbrella organization. We opened a bank account in mid-November so we could use it for Debconf matters. According to either Mexican law or the regulations in the bank AMESOL works with (it is not clear to me), however, this account was basically useless - We were (of course) able to put money in it, but in order to use it we had to jump through incredible amounts of loops - Just to give you an example, every cheque we were to made would have to be signed by the three members of the AMESOL board plus either my wife or myself (as Debconf representatives). We could not get an ATM card (as this was not a personal account), and we could only make electronic operations if the bank personnel installed a specific software in our (of course, Windows-based) PC. And even then, we would have to register in advance each of our business partners with the bank in order to make any transfers to them (a process that in our case took at least three days). And pay about US$7 per transfer. Yes, ridiculous. I must first of all thank AMESOL, and specially Jose Luis Chiquete for his cooperation and help through this process. They invested a lot of time and money to get the account running (I'm not going into details in this public forum, but feel free to privately asking me for further information). We had to take a decision, and it is by no means their fault. We were supposed to pay the first 10% to Oaxtepec by the end of November. We got the money transferred from Finland in time, but had to keep Oaxtepec waiting until the beginning of January. As I didn't think the bank would answer to us in time, I got a personal loan for this money and paid on January 10. Some days before this, my wife and I talked also with our accountant, who told us we would not have any special problems if we ran Debconf off a personal bank account - So we opened an account, whose only current titular is my wife, and will be using that account for all of our needs. Fiscally, Debconf will be 0wn3d by her. About the bank account: We will try to operate -in part for our personal security- with as little money as possible on it at all times. Of course, money will be transferred to and from it, but -at least until we get close to Debconf, where we will need to have money handy- we strongly prefer to keep it with the minimum needed cash. Now, once again, I want to thank AMESOL. I hope we find more possibilities to collaborate besides running the checkbook - The businesses that belong to AMESOL can probably help us a lot with different aspects of our organization. I hope to be able to talk soon with AMESOL about this. Greetings, -- Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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