wealth-masters-international-logoBack in November last year, Wealth Masters International made the announcement that they would be branching into both nutrition and finance. Under the branding Opes Partners and WMI ‘PURE’ respectively, both divisions were set to launch in 2011.

Opes Partners seems to have launched quietly in the first half of 2011, but has received minimal promotion or marketing from Wealth Masters themselves. All in all, Opes Partners is not marketed to new prospects nor is it featured prominently on their website – it’s thus far been pretty much a failure as far as being an asset to the MLM side of WMI goes.

PURE on the other hand, headed up by Deanna Latson was originally announced to launch in the first quarter of 2011, but this was later pushed back to September 2011.

In May, Latson accepted full responsibility for the delay;

The launch delay is 100% my responsibility as I am putting together the scientific board of advisors and it is taking much longer than anticipated. Most of the advisors are MD’s and it takes a lot of time and negotiation.

With a new launch date of September, things seemed to be progressing smoothly and on track.

Well, that was until last week Deanna Latson made the announcement that she’d not only resigned as CEO of PURE, but has gone one step further and severed all ties with Wealth Masters International.

In a Facebook status update published last week, Latson announced;

To all my WMI friends on facebook. I have been privileged to work with you all for the last 6 years. I am saddened to say that I will no longer be working with the WMI community. I will no longer be at the events or working with corporate.

I am so grateful for my long standing relationships and friendships that have come from this 6 year relationship. I wish you all the best and I look forward to staying in touch.

With just over a month to go and no official word from Wealth Masters regarding Latson’s departure or the future of WMI PURE, Latson’s resignation no doubt has made a large dent on plans to launch PURE in September.

Without any official public word from Wealth Masters themselves on the matter however, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see.

The bigger questions here of course though are not only why did Latson resign as CEO, but what prompted her to sever all ties with Wealth Masters altogether.

With a six year business relationship between the two, completely ceasing all communications between the parties couldn’t have been a decision made lightly. Least of all with a significant company launch just weeks away.

What with the complete lacklustre launch of Opes Partners and now questionable status of WMI’s PURE company, the cynic in me can’t help but wonder if this is Wealth Master’s realisation that their big money has always been in the recruitment of others, and not in product lines.

Since I first analysed the WMI product line I’ve always maintained that the entire business model is designed to condition people who join WMI to make ‘smart’ choices with their money by getting involved with programs that those running WMI get a cut out of for every person that joins.

In other words, it’s a large scale financial affiliate network perpetrated by those running WMI.

With the seeming failure of both Opes Partners and PURE, it seems that I’m not the only one that’s realised this. Legality and ethics aside, perhaps someone at WMI has also come to the realisation that touting inhouse products probably isn’t going to net them as much money as convincing people to invest in affiliate programs at conferences that cost thousands just to attend.

But again, that’s just the cynic in me.

In the meantime, Latson seems to have moved on to relatively new MLM upstart, ARIIX. Co-inciding with her departure from Wealth Masters, Latson appears to have signed on as ‘Chief Product Officer’ sometime last week.

I wonder if things will pan out any better for her there.