Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Trustee takes the expected line, essentially, and also says that Nachef was fully involved in the process, not just Knoblock. The confirmation hearing is on 14th May and these issues will be addressed.
The Knabb/prosecution argument seems to be that defining the exact amount of loss is impracticable - which actually makes sense to me in these cases - how do you exactly quantify the impact of the criminal activity on the share price over a given period etc etc? So they use the amount of Knabb's criminal gain as a proxy - a common move & IMO often reasonable.
But then they construe the sentencing guideline language narrowly to make upwards ratchets apply only to victim actual losses, and not to this proxy criminal gain. So no upwards ratchet here.
On commonsense grounds this appears to be nonsense - will indeed be interesting to see what the judge says.
Did Knabb sing against anybody? I've seen courts and prosecutors take a softer line than probation in cases where somebody has helped other prosecutions significantly. Obvious rationale: the only way you usually get convictions in these cases is with somebody singing; courts tossing out plea agreements would have a chilling effect.
I see the plea agreement is sealed, unfortunately.
EDIT: One of the other cases I'm thinking of involves Locateplus/PDGT. Dan O'Riordan was charged as CEO of PDGT; he sang against the Locateplus ex-CEO and CFO. He & the prosecution argued against upwards ticks in the PSR. The judge supported their positions, explicitly referring to the valuer of insiders singing and the chilling efefct if reasonable ple agreements were not upheld.
On the other hand, there are grounds for at least questioning whether this was a deal cooked up by the prosecution to shaft the ex-CEO/CFO with everything and protect other Locateplus insiders, who from the record were quite obviously complicit but were never charged. Eg: the prosecutor, AUSA Victor Wild, was on the board of pennyscam pinky along with one of the other insiders - extraordinary! - and a bunch of other stuff.
Company info updated at OTC Markets: http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/VRAL/company-info
States that O/S as of 11th May = 1,132,866,598 which is an increase of 200M since end 2011.
BlueWater Advisory Group LLC is now listed as IR firm. As noted in a previous post, this is headed by Bryan G Crane, who was convicted in an FBI kickback sting in 2007.
Also filed the usual notice that they will be late submitting their Q1 financials and information statement (otherwise due Monday, I believe). They still haven't filed their 2011 information statement and attorney letter.
They are a Boston-based penny PIPE player. Deals:
Aqualiv Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB:AQLV) (Pending), Capital Reserve Canada Ltd. (OTCPK:CRSV.F) (Pending), Coastal Pacific Mining Corp. (OTCPK:CPMC.F), CRC Crystal Research Corp. (OTCPK:CYSA) (Pending), CYIOS Corp. (OTCBB:CYIO), DigitalTown, Inc. (OTCPK:DGTW) (Pending), Eagle Oil Holding Company, Inc. (OTCPK:EGOH) (Pending), EVCARCO, Inc. (OTCBB:EVCA) (Pending), Exergetic Energy, Inc. (Pending), Feel Golf Company, Inc. (OTCPK:FEEL) (Pending), Green Energy Live, Inc. (OTCPK:GELV) (Pending), GreenGold Ray Energies, Inc. (OTCPK:GRYE) (Pending), ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Ltd. (OTCBB:IMUC), Insight Management Corporation (OTCPK:ISIM) (Pending), Island Breeze International, Inc. (OTCPK:IBII) (Pending), Microgenix Manufacturing Inc. (OTCPK:MGXM.F) (Pending), Monster Offers (OTCBB:MONT.D) (Pending), Revolutions Medical Corporation (OTCPK:RMCP), Rising India, Inc. (OTCPK:RSII), Seaway Valley Capital Corporation (OTCPK:SEVA) (Pending), Solanbridge Group, Inc. (OTCPK:SLNX) (Pending), Steele Resources Corporation (OTCBB:SELR) (Pending), StrikeForce Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB:SFOR) (Pending), Sunvalley Solar, Inc. (OTCPK:SSOL), Winchester International Resorts Inc. (OTCPK:WNCH)
In other words, a whole bunch of trash. The MD, Lou Posner, used to be VP Corp Finance at Dutchess, another Boston-area trash player.
The trading looks pretty dubious, doesn't it?
Those 100 share pops at the close look like somebody needs a daily mark on the stock. And as you say, who's actually buying the thing in these volumes, with no current promotion & not much movement in the price?
Not hard to believe that maybe there's a bunch of wash/matched trading going on to give the appearance of liquidity.
And easy to make up stories along these lines ... somebody holding say $500K face-value notes convertible at $0.0025 could paint a picture where he's holding an asset with a "market value" of more than $2M (ie value the notes on an as-converted basis = 200M common times by a bit over a penny).
The audience for the picture could be somebody lending him money against the position as collateral; or somebody investing in his fund which holds the asset and paying him an inflated management fee based on inflated asset values.
In either case this counterparty/dupe would probably want to see sufficient liquidty in the stock to give comfort that the position could be realized over an acceptable period, and maybe requires a daily market mark to value the investment/collateral.
Those are classic pennyscam games, pervasive throughout this appalling snake-pit of a "market".
It does seem a bit strange to call somebody smart/intelligent when he is being sued by the SEC for fraud & his career prospects don't seem to be in really excellent shape right now.
It makes no sense.
But people are going to find out anyway. If he doesn't disclose he'll just end up looking double-plus-sleazy to anybody who cares one way or the other.
How are Laurus/Valens/the Grins doing these days?
http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/fury-as-structured-debt-trust-investors-face-heavy-losses/a582829
Investors [evidently morons] in the troubled PSource Structured Debt (PSD) trust have vented their frustration, as they wait to hear whether any value can be realised from the proposed IPO of the trust’s main asset, a US-based microcap biomass firm [Parabel f/k/a PetroAlgae, PINK:PABL; almost totally owned by Laurus + associates, hardly ever trades, huge negative equity, no revenue, completely bogus ~$300M market cap, stalled bogus-looking IPO plans back in 2010, zero IPO prospects now.]
The $75.4 million trust, managed by US-based Laurus Capital Management’s Eugene and David Grin, is currently trading on an 83.6% discount to net asset value (NAV) discount and has lost 60.8% over the past 12 months. It counts Midas Capital, Brooks Macdonald, Collins Stewart and Premier Asset Management feature among its largest shareholders.
Although Laurus has announced proposals for a managed wind-down, investors are furious the board allowed the trust to breach its investment policy. Its largest holding in biomass company Parabel now stands at just under 80% of the portfolio.
The success of realising value from the trust depends on its IPO, although the early stage company is yet to generate any revenues. Complicating things further, Parabel is also owned by Laurus through two of its funds.
Colin McInnes of Quartet Capital Partners, who inherited a holding in the trust as a legacy position in a client portfolio, added: ‘Notionally there is secondary market liquidity, but it is trading on an 80% discount. But this discount is tied up in a single company which lost $50 million and has zero revenues. I am just surprised that PSource or the independent board of directors did not have greater oversight to what has been happening with the underlying investment.’
MAM Funds’ Richard Parfect is the trust’s largest shareholder through holdings in his Midas Balanced Growth fund and Income and Growth trust, having invested since launch. He said the firm is not pushing to appoint a liquidator due to Laurus’ substantial interest in Parabel, but believes a successful IPO is not out of the question.
‘We have been in the trust for a long period and there is no point in selling now, even if it is a small part of the portfolio,’ he said. ‘There is a future possibility of returns and we don’t want to lose the opportunity as there could be a successful realisation of the main asset.’
The trust launched in August 2007 targeting investment opportunities in US growth companies through secured debt and warrants. However, when the financial crisis hit the investment company accrued a $24 million liability to the Bank of Scotland. The trust has now paid off its debt.
PSource managing director Soondra Appavoo stressed the board had taken the first available opportunity to wind down the trust, adding: ‘Ultimately the board of PSD continues to monitor Parabel very closely and is committed to the process of achieving good value.’
And recalling Nathan Vardi's pieces on Laurus, PSource, PALG/PABL etc a couple of years ago, eg:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0907/money-laurus-capital-petroalgae-hedge-fund-shuffle.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2010/09/21/the-real-reason-for-the-petroalgae-ipo/
I guess the YHOO Locateplus board will disappear when the stock's registration is revoked so I'll post over here from now on.
LP Acquisition Partners (LPAP), the Knoblock et al group which ended up with WorlWide Info and TruBackgrounds and wanted the public shell for whatever purposes, has filed a pleading in the Ch.11 case, stating that they want the deal to be rejigged.
They say that their Counsel (Knoblock, yes?) was not a good fellow. He completed the transaction with the Trustee without telling them - the other partners say they signed pieces of paper without realising they were for completion. They really only wanted the shell but the deal as consummated by Knoblock didn't include it. They only learned about the Jan 2012 closing "weeks" after it happened.
In the meantime, they say, Knoblock did a lot of other things, unspecified, without their knowledge or authority. They had to hire forensic accoutnants etc to track down his "apparent improper" activity.
They want the court to reduce the $400K they paid and the liabilities they took on, or give them the shell (I'd say they could have it, seeing it's about to be revoked), or whatever.
I guess the Trustee's position will be - "Tough luck! It's between you & Knoblock." I wonder if Knoblock will make his side of the story known?
Anyway, another murky, retarded little LP-related story. There was obviously a curse of stupidity on the thing, draining several dozen IQ points from anyone who touched it.
That's the O/S reported in the annual financials as of 31st Dec 2011. In the subsequent events section they report issuing a further 15M common in Jan/Feb, so the O/S is at least ~947M common now (plus 4.75M shares of preferred stock, convertible into 47.5M common.)
Partiuclarly given that they are always late, whatever O/S info you can get from their OTC Markets filings will generally be out of date.
To find out what the O/S is right now I guess you'd have to contact the TA.
I think every one of Lauer's underlings and service providers who were criminally [indicted] ended up with convictions.
To be precise, Martin Garvey walked along with Lauer.
Another little indication of the prosecution's weak performance: comments from jury members after the trial indicate some of them bought the story that Lauer was surrounded by crooks but not necessarily a crook himself ... based on the guilty pleas of some of his people.
That's some consolation for the DoJ's catastrophic fail in Lauer's criminal case.
It was one of the simplest hedge fund frauds you can imagine: get almost 100% control of a handful of OTC stocks nobody cares about; manipulate the prices to give them apparent market valuations in the hundreds of $M; supercharge by getting the companies to issue you floods of apparently deep-in-the-money warrants & options; rip off your stupid and/or kick-backed investors on the 2%/20% management fee. Then collapse when the redemption demands start to come in.
I think every one of Lauer's underlings and service providers who were criminally ended up with convictions.
Lauer, with the public defender as his trial attorney, called no witnesses in his defense, and walked. The quality of the prosecution case at trial might be indicated by jury notes filed in the case. Eg: the foreman asking the judge for guidance on what is legal and what is illegal when it comes to securities. (The judge declined to assist.)
I think this might have had some chilling effect on prosecutions of other hedge fund frauds. Eg maybe Ribotsky/NIR - similar in some respects though perhaps not quite as retarded.
Kind of interesting how the SEC seems to be having a little blitz on shemes to avoid registration requirements by playing games with debts ....
I'd say VRAL, its outside attorney Robert Forrester and DMBM etc should take careful note of this SEC action announced yesterday: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2012/lr22352.htm
- Exemptions to registration requirements are generally not available to "underwriters" eg people acquiring securities with the intention of selling into the market.
- Exemptions are never available where the arrangement has been designed to circumvent registration requirements.
- "Wrap arounds" don't convert debts into securities and you generally can't tack some more debt onto old debt to take advantage of an earlier issue date for avoiding resale restrictions.
So what validity for a bunch of those free-trading shares issued to DMBM etc?
EDIT: And this one today - http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2012/2012-82.htm
Still no 2011 information statement or attorney letter filed at OTC Markets? That's lame.
Any bad news they feel compelled to disclose will be buried in the info statement, not in PR's, of course.
And deregistration hearing scheduled: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2012/34-66876.pdf
And a deregistration hearing scheduled: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2012/34-66876.pdf
Company got a Wells notice for this back in January.
IPhone watch thinggie start-up raises $7M on Kickstarter: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/technology/kickstarter-sets-off-financing-rush-for-a-watch-not-yet-made.html
Just think how much you might be able to raise if you had ummm say a magic box for generating free electricty from clouds!
There's a little P&D on this stock every few months.
You might want to bear in mind that the company is issuing shares to insiders at $0.0025 now - see http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74876016
Financials for 2011 filed at OTC Markets. Still waiting on the information statement.
On a quick flick I notice that the insider pricing on VRAL ie the price given to DMBM was reset in November to $0.0025 from $0.005.
Note 7(e): Convertible debentures for a total of ~$725K issued to DMBM in Nov and Dec. After 3rd Nov, convertible into common at lowest price of any other issuance but no less than $0.0025 ($0.005 before then). Thru end 2011 they converted $91,598 worth into 23,319,600 common - which gives an average price of ~$0.004, indicating that some were converted at $0.0025, I think.
The ~$635K balance of these DMBM notes was due on 31st March this year. If it was all converted and and dumped before then, that would have added another 250M+ shares to the O/S. Figure over a billion shares on issue now, given that there were ~933M as of end December.
BTW, that $0.0025 level looks like it was set by another DMBM convertible, which was simply repriced to that level and which DMBM partially converted in November (see Note 3). How nice the company is to DMBM, with all these price resets!
If you're wondering where that $1.4M interest expense in the P&L came from, think it's mainly from the deep deep discounts on conversion share issuance.
On another note, interesting to ponder where DMBM gets its money from, given that they look like low-rent grifters. If the T&T note was assigned to them and they did make a killing from it during the Oct/Nov pump'n'dump .... Hopefully the info statement will give some insight.
The agony of a True Long - kind of thing which makes you want to poke scammers in the eye:
If somebody told me(like I told many two years ago when I started following XXXX) that this could be a goldmine and you can strike it rich in ONE YEAR, Do you think that they would hate me to death if they struck it rich in Three Years. NO WAY.....I WILL GET MY FRIENDS BACK AND THEY WILL TALK TO ME ONCE AGAIN...MY WIFE MIGHT EVEN QUIT HER SECOND FULL TIME JOB AND ALSO QUIT THE VOLUNTEER WORK ON SUNDAYS....
I WILL GET MY LIFE BACK IN ORDER.....AND YOU WILL TOO.....
Crane was convicted in Feb 2007 as a result of an FBI sting; case 9:06-cr-80010 in fed dist court FLSD.
He was an exec for a company called Roaming Messenger Inc n/k/a OCTBB:WYNY. He along with the WYNY then-chair did a deal with undercover FBI informants to sell stock to the FBI's fictitious hedge fund and pay illegal kickbacks to the fund manager.
http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22406400
A zillion pennyscammers have been caught in these stings and some have actually been convicted, including Crane.
He sang to the FBI about somebody else and pled to one count; the plea deal got him off with 6 months home detention, a $10K fine and 5 years probabtion, ending earlier this year. As part of his probation he seems to have been banned from being an officer of a public company and undertaking any biz to do with stock trading or investments - now he's off that hook.
Just to check it's the same guy: the WYNY 10K for 2004/2005, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/743758/000106594905000117/rmi10ksb2005final.txt mentions his invovlement with something called Muir, Crane & Co:
Bryan Crane has been our Vice President of Corporate Development since October 2002. Prior to joining Roaming Messenger, from 1995 to 2002, he worked for Muir, Crane & Co., a partnership he co-founded and in which he still maintains an ownership interest.
His current LinkedIn profile names him as head of Bluewater and as a founder of Muir, Crane & Co: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bryancrane
Crane/Bluewater last year also did PR/IR stuff for OTCBB:SFOR, another Hugh Austin/Imperial Consulting story. A reasonable guess that Austin intro'd him to VRAL?
If so, I wonder if Haig is happy about being connected up with somebody with a federal criminal record.
And somebody who you'd think might wear a wire for the feds under the right circumstances, given how tunefully he seems to have sung for them back in the day.
Long, detailed response by SEC to CR's motion to dismiss. Legal technicalities; no new info of any interest as far as I can see.
Huh!
Obviously I'm stuck in 2008. Maybe even earlier :)
Bryan Guy Crane/Bluewater Advisory/GLTV/VRAL
This guy was recently appointed an officer/director for GLTV (a company about which I know nothing) and has recently popped as PR provider for VRAL.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/greenlite-announces-appointment-bryan-g-130000021.html
He was convicted in one of those FBI hedge fund kick-back stings back in 2007, coming out of probation earlier this year, seemingly all set to rock'n'roll once again down the pennyscam freeway. Some details:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74687946
In another classy exercise, VRAL seems to have engaged a thing called Bluewater Advisory, headed by one Bryan Guy Crane, for PR work. See eg the PR for the pathetic March update letter, down the bottom: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/viral-genetics-publishes-march-2012-monthly-letter-to-shareholders-2012-03-14
Crane was convicted in Feb 2007 as a result of an FBI sting; case 9:06-cr-80010 in fed dist court FLSD.
He was an exec for a company called Roaming Messenger Inc n/k/a OCTBB:WYNY. He along with the WYNY then-chair did a deal with undercover FBI informants to sell stock to the FBI's fictitious hedge fund and pay illegal kickbacks to the fund manager. A zillion pennyscammers got caught in this sting and some were actually convicted, including Crane.
He sang to the FBI about somebody else and pled to one count; the plea deal got him off with 6 months home detention, a $10K fine and 5 years probabtion, ending earlier this year. As part of his probation he seems to have been banned from being an officer of a public company and undertaking any biz to do with stock trading or investments- now he's off that hook.
Just to check it's the same guy: the WYNY 10K for 2004/2005, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/743758/000106594905000117/rmi10ksb2005final.txt mentions his invovlement with something called Muir, Crane & Co:
Bryan Crane has been our Vice President of Corporate Development since October 2002. Prior to joining Roaming Messenger, from 1995 to 2002, he worked for Muir, Crane & Co., a partnership he co-founded and in which he still maintains an ownership interest.
His current LinkedIn profile names him as head of Bluewater and as a founder of Muir, Crane & Co: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bryancrane
Yep, that sounds like the China I know. *** shudder ***
FWIW, there's enough info in the PCAOB's 2006 inspection report & L&H's response to make it clear that the audit deficiency identified wasn't to do with Locateplus.
The PCAOB's 2008 report was completely clean.
So it seems that they found nothing amiss at all in L&H's audits of LP. It was baffling to me at the time the reports came out, becoming simply amazing when the SEC's admin action was released last year - which made it clear that the work papers must have been festooned with red flags at the time of the inspections.
Pulling on my tin-foil hat, I do wonder if there was some corruption going on. There's all of this murky Mass stuff surrounding LP, including the FBI's head of criminal enforcement (Ken Kaiser, formerly FBI SAC Boston) resigning to join LP, at what looks like the bequest of another ex-SAC Boston, Jim Ahearn, at that time an LP director.
Kaiser immediately and quite probably illegally started meeting with FBI and DoJ people investigating LP. Emails filed in court make it look like Kaiser was trying to steer the FBI towards putting the wind up an investor who was causing problems, and away from LP insiders including the guy who was chair of LP's audit committee at the time of the events detailed in the admin action against L&H, one Thomas E. Murphy.
Murphy continued as what looks like a kind of a low-rent eminence grise for LP for years after resigning from the board. He was heavily involved in Kaiser's activities, judging from the emails. The details in the SEC's admin complaint against L&H certainly raise questions for me about why he has never been charged with anything.
Fair point but I suppose IHUB would want it's stuff to work with the most common browser, even if it's a POS.
Seems to be broken, at least for me. I always get that error msg I quoted.
EDIT: Oh, it works fine with FF; just tested. Still have the prob with IE9.
IHUB all-posts seach doesn't do phrases? ie a grouop of words in quotes.
It gives me this response:
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at IHUtils.SearchGrammar.ConvertQuery(AstNode node, TermType type) in I:\Documents and Settings\John\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\SearchGrammar\SearchGrammar\SearchGrammar.cs:line 86 at Boards_msgsearch.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e)
I've lost most of my faith in PCAOB inspections. Livingstone & Haynes of MA were auditors for the Locateplus scam, one of their two issuer clients. L&H delivered clean audit reports for years for LP, despite a forest of blatantly obvious red flags.
The PCAOB conducted two investigations of L&H during the period and found nothing major amiss. This seems incredible when you look at the details of the SEC's eventual admin action against L&H: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2011/34-64607.pdf
Previous auditors (who resigned) warning them off; detailed & repeated allegations of fraud from ex-insiders; audit committee refusal to investigate; inability to establish existence of pupported customers and revenue; completely inadequate testing ....
There should have been more than enough in L&H's work papers to make much of this failing clear at the time of the PCAOB inspections. So what did the PCAOB actually do during their inspections?
Sure!
You can be Special Consultant on Cloud Electrictity Rights Regulatory Affairs, peviously working as Policy Director with the UN Multi-Lateral Commission on the Economic Development of the Sub-Stratosphere (we'll also need that in French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic & Japanese, please).
Draft up a contract for me to ignore & I'll print you off some shares.
I'm afraid it is company policy not to provide special hats to consultants, so if you want one you'll have to design it & have it made yourself.
Let's just be thankful that under the JOBS Act bold risk-takers like SEFE and me will be freed from the shackles of the past when it comes to chiselling money out of people who would otherwise only spend it on big-screen TVs or their children's education.
Some of the best investment returns in the wind power game have come from identifying likely sites for future wind farms and snapping up the real estate.
By analogy, I am thinking of forming a company to acquire clouds or the rights to the electricity contained within clouds, front-running SEFE's roll-out plans.
My brochure will be 50 pages long, not SEFE's miserly 11 pages, and will include pictures of Kate Upton rolling around semi-naked on piles of currency notes emitting photo-shopped electric lightning bolts.
The good older old days! Dunno what happened to EVEN.
That SEFE promotion makes Surber, Wolfson et al look like pikers :)
I think he has connections to some Arab royalty somewhere - there was that kind of money inside the Telynx p&d.
TPK was getting it on with the trannie in the family car when his wife found him. The good old days!
Ali al-Dahwi, the chair of Telynx back when it was a classic 2000-ish Laurus/Schlaff toxic pump'n'dump play, abandoned the company without a word to the market once he'd driven it in the ground. He then packed up his carpet bag and headed off to his native Iraq to become the CEO of the biggest mobile phone company there.
http://comm.ae/ali-al-dahwi-steps-down-as-zain-iraq-ceo/
Madsen & Associates were the "auditors" for Telynx in the period when The Pennyking and other grifters were fighting over it like homeless drunks fighting over a cigarette butt.
I don't think they did a very good job:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=16295935&txt2find=madsen