Jorge Vergara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jorge Vergara is a Mexican businessman and film producer. He owns four football (soccer) clubs: Chivas de Guadalajara of Mexico, Deportivo Saprissa of Costa Rica and C.D. Chivas USA of Major League Soccer, and Chivas China. He also produces international movies like Y tu mama tambien thru his company Producciones Anhelo.
He also is an owner of Omnilife.
Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Vergara has been the director of Omnilife de Mexico since 1991. Creating products for healthy living, the company grew rapidly to become Grupo Omnilife, one of the Top 250 companies in Mexico, with 1.5 million distributors in twelve countries. Back in the 1980's Vergara sold condominiums and timeshares in Manzanillo, Mexico, where he met worked with John Peterson. When Peterson became a Herbalife salesperson, he recruited Vergara and together they began selling Herbalife products in Mexico. Since Herbalife had not received Mexican government approval to sell their products, Peterson and Vergara had to smuggle the products into the country. After six months of smuggling the products into Mexico, Herbalife took notice and began the process of getting government approval. Vergara was asked to help get the Herbalife products approved by the Mexican government and was instrumental in helping Herbalifes founder, Mark Hughes deal with the Mexicans. This gave Vergara insight into how a multi-level company Profits and expands into other countries. Vergara was partners with Roger Daley, Jim Fobair and Charlie Ragus. With already the 51% of the company, Vergara acquired the rest of Omnitrition at the end of the deal with his U.S. partners and took the whole control of Omnitrition de Mexico.
Vergara met Alfonso Cuarón in 1999. His love of films had led him to seek out filmmakers for his corporate movies. Cuarón, however, was more interested in filming Y tu mamá también, and gave Vergara the screenplay. He read it and proposed that they begin production right away and Producciones Anhelo was born. Anhelo would go on to co-produce Guillermo del Toro's El Espinazo Del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone), along with Pedro Almodovar's El Deseo and del Toro's Tequila Gang. Anhelo also produced Sebastián Cordero's Crónicas.
Vergara has always guaranteed his directors creative freedom and the best possible production quality. In 2002, Variety named him one of its Ten Producers to Watch[citation needed]. For the 2004 edition of the Guadalajara Film Festival, Vergara created the JVC Award for Best Director, which was given to Fernando Eimbcke for his feature debut Temporada de patos.