Ribotsky's actions are highly illegal. As I'm sure you know, his modus operandi for "investing" is a convolluted PIPE structure which are not actual investments in the company, at least in the traditional sense, but simply a mechanism for him to manipulate the stock price of these unsuspecting companies for his own personal gain. He inserts clauses buried within the covenants of the bonds allowing him to convert his bonds into more and more shares the lower the share price while locking in a significant discount to the average prevailing share price. Therefore he has a vested interest in seeing the shares go down and he manipulates the stock accordingly destroying companies he "invests" in while wiping out a tremendous amount of wealth for shareholders legitimately investing in those companies in the process.
To call these PIPEs an adversarial invesment is, at best a tremendous euphemism ,and in reality can not possibly be construed as anything other then a mere trading vehicle he uses to manipulate the stock lower for his personal benefit. I may be wrong but t the best of my knowledge there are no companies in which he has a parenthetical PIPE investment in that have seen a share price appreciation since the time of his investment. On the contrary, most companies he has a "Pipe investment" in have seen considerable share price depreciation on average more then 50%...yet at the same time he claims his funds were up more then 16% a year for 3 years straight. It is utterly impossible to generate these sort of returns while the underlying stock of his "investments" are down more then 50%. Unless, of course he was manipulating the stock price....which is highly illegal!