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April 4, 2005 (FinancialWire) It’s now only 6 days until the airing of the Dateline NBC expose on illegal manipulative short selling, scheduled by the General Electric (NYSE: GE) network this coming Sunday night, April 10, and the war of words rages on.

April 4, 2005 (FinancialWire) It’s now only 6 days until the airing of the Dateline NBC expose on illegal manipulative short selling, scheduled by the General Electric (NYSE: GE) network this coming Sunday night, April 10, and the war of words rages on.
The Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) Newswires have reported how Overstock (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO, Patrick Byrne is featured in a new “activist video” sponsored by the National Coalition Against Naked Short Selling, whose founder, a secretive individual calling himself Robert O’Brien, who got “mad as hell” and decided he wasn’t going to “take it any more” after claiming to have lost money to market manipulators while invested in Novastar Financial (NYSE: NFI).
Now O’Brien has posted a blog at http://bobosrevenge.blogspot.com , that claims U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Assistant Director of Market Regulation James Brigagliano of lying to U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) in April, 2003, to cover up illegal naked short sales.
O’Brien says he has evidence that Brigagliano dismissed email evidence of settlement failures that he could not explain as “pertaining to a corporate action taken in June of 2004, ignoring that the emails/statements were dated nearly 14 months prior.”
In other words, says O’Brien, the SEC official attempted to explain away the questions that Sarbanes asked him by referencing an event that at the time of the emails had not yet occurred.
FinancialWire had reported on the video, at http://tinyurl.com/5vq8y , last week, as well as the debate between the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. and EuroMoney, the prestigious Institutional Investor magazine that is considered the Bible of European financial institutions. The DTCC says EuroMoney’s comprehensive series on “naked short selling,” which the DTCC’s counsel, Larry Thompson recently stated he finds no evidence exists, is just “sloppy journalism.”
“We will not accept silently this type of sloppy, one-sided journalism whether in print or broadcast,” said Thompson, apparently in a warm-up to the expected onslaught of public opinion after the upcoming Dateline NBC network telecast.
The DTCC, which is run under the joint authority of the New York Stock Exchange and NASD, both government-sponsored SROs, may even have run afoul of serious laws against interference with the press, according to attorney Marshal Shichtman, Esq., who is investigating the organization’s purported collusion with Investors Business Daily in an attempt to censor or squelch further distribution of FinancialWire.
This comes hard on the heels of an ad in the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) from The Washington Legal Foundation, located at http://www.wlf.org, which has considerable clout in the Bush administration, with ten of its board members now serving in various capacities, including three, headed by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in the Bush cabinet. Its “In All Fairness” advertorial, “What’s Up With The SEC?” may be seen at http://www.wlf.org/upload/032805IAFSEC.pdf
The advertorial alleges that class action lawyers are colluding with short sellers “right under the noses of SEC investigators,” whose abuses cause “investors, employees, pensioners and companies” to “lose millions of dollars in stock value each year.”
The WLF said that the SEC has been “sitting on several complaints of misconduct” that it and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have filed that detail “examples of questionable stock manipulation by short sellers and class action attorneys.”
The group says that the SEC is “looking the other way while class action attorneys enjoy a free-for-all, reaping millions in windfall fees to the detriment of shareholders,” and asks “why isn’t the SEC taking legal and regulatory action to prevent stock manipulation and to protect investors from the looting by plaintiffs’ lawyers? Shouldn’t there be rules and oversight to deter these trial lawyer abuses?”
It concludes that “the SEC must show America that it can get tough with more sinister villains than Martha Stewart.”
Recently also, Motley Fool lambasted regulators for letting what it called “71-year-old laws” against naked short selling go unenforced.
The article is at http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentary05032407.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=....
Recently U.S. Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT), pointedly questioned SEC Chair William Donaldson about naked short selling, and what he said was a failure by the SEC to enforce existing laws.
A video of the exchange is at http://www.investrendinformation.com