First American Scientific Corp. (fka FASC)

[Setonian]

OT...TR...I think we could use you to be our representative for our concerns with FASC. Found this on my other investment board.....By: ibjbf
08 Jul 2005, 05:47 PM EDT
Msg. 33354 of 33365
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OT: Speaks of the power that the internet can bring to shareholders.

http://ajc.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&expire=&urlID=8074905&fb =Y&partnerID=550
Yahoo-ers muscle onto Mirant panel

By MARGARET NEWKIRK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
7/8/05


Houston accountant Mike Willingham doesn't own enough stock to sit on the stockholder committeefor Atlanta's bankrupt Mirant Corp. But he's on it, thanks to an unusual campaign he launched when the struggling energy company filed for Chapter 11 protection this summer.

Willingham, known as Hammr6 on the Internet, holds the committee's Yahoo seat.

He represents Westlurker, JohnGalt, Arizzzona, Oledude and hundreds of other Mirant stockholders who frequent a Yahoo Internet chat room now banished in post-bankruptcy ignominy to a Web site location only the already initiated can find.

Through proxies from more than 400 of those Yahoo-ers, Willingham now controls 23 million shares of Mirant stock, enough to wedge himself onto the committee appointed to represent the company's stockholders' interests -- or to stir up mischief at its next annual meeting, for that matter, although Willingham isn't talking about that.

The stockholders' committee is one of three trying to protect their interests as the company moves through Chapter 11.

It's also the one with the least leverage: Stockholders are usually wiped out in bankruptcies, where their interests are legally trumped by those of creditors. The other two committees represent creditors.

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Without a committee of their own, Mirant stockholders wouldn't have stood a chance, Willingham says.

And even with one, the "little guys" among the stockholders might not have had a voice, he says.

His proxy block is those little guys, he says. Some of them lost millions.

Among them, says Willingham, are "doctors, lawyers, trust holders, homemakers, plant supervisors, managers, CEOs, company presidents, business owners, CPAs, energy traders and professionals, retired persons, IT techs, engineers, military people now serving in Iraq, domestic airline pilots, Mirant employees, Southern Co. employees and individuals and families from four continents."

U.S. bankruptcy trustee George McElreath says he's never seen anything else like it.

"There have been Internet chat rooms that have affected the course of bankruptcies, mainly because they can affect the price of the stock," says McElreath, trustee for Texas' northern district. But "all those proxies. I've never heard of [shareholders] doing something like that."

'I couldn't just sit there'

At 32, Willingham says he may be the youngest of the investors who banded together on the Yahoo board.

A former energy trader and energy consultant, Willingham bought Mirant stock in July 2002, well after the company was already in trouble. He paid only $5 per share, in the belief that Mirant eventually would benefit from the vacuum left in the independent power business after industry leader Enron collapsed.

Later, feeling that "Mirant didn't seem to be getting it together," Willingham says, he went trolling for insight and stumbled onto the Yahoo message board, then already more than 200,000 message posts strong.

In the mix of wild "Mirant to the Moon!!" stock pumpers and equally savage "Sell NOW suckers!!!" stock bashers, Willingham found a cadre of fellow investors who seemed tuned in to the company's problems and prospects.

Friendships developed on the Mirant message board. So did cliques and rivalries and at least one tragedy: The Mirant Yahoo-ers flooded the family of Floridian Dave Larkin with sympathy last year, after Larkin, who had lost everything on Mirant, committed suicide.

The Yahoo posters watched with trepidation as Mirant and its July 14 debt deadlines closed in on each other. Most still believed that the company would avoid full-fledged Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Willingham says he was as dumbfounded as anyone when the company filed.

As the stock plummeted, then slipped off the New York Stock Exchange, the message board went into a frenzy: Stockholders are last in line for any claims against bankrupt companies and are almost invariably wiped out.

Posters advised one another to bookmark the Mirant Web site, which would soon become a "ghost" -- available only to those who knew or had bookmarked its full Internet address.

The distraught posters also got some psychological advice from a wag who declared the lot of them chat room addicts who needed to move the chatter to a new board: "nomoreposting.com."

Willingham, meanwhile, "wanted to do something. I couldn't just sit there and let things go."

100 pledges the first day

He put out the word on the ghosted Web site, saying he wanted to push for a shareholders' committee and secure a seat on it for the little guys -- non-institutional shareholders -- if the committee was formed.

Willingham expected 10 or 20 responses, at best, to his request for faxed share pledges. He got 100 the first day.

The denizens of the message board began to perk up.

With an Illinois man serving as his secretary, Willingham amassed his growing block of proxies at a cost of about $10,000, he says, in telephone calls, travel, extra fax lines, consultations with lawyers, document preparation and the creation of a Web site. By September, when McElreath appointed the shareholders' committee, Willingham had amassed proxies for 17.3 million shares.

Because he didn't actually own the shares, Willingham still had no guaranteed seat on the committee. Inspired by his campaign, other shareholders pushed to expand the committee in order to include him.

Then an Atlanta investor with more shares stepped aside, giving his seat to Willingham. That investor, who didn't return phone calls seeking comment, became an instant message board hero.

Whether the committee will recoup anything for stockholders remains to be seen.

For a bemused McElreath, it continues to bring surprises.

The veteran bankruptcy trustee says he had to step in last week after learning that a Yahoo poster was soliciting money on the ghost board to defray Willingham's costs. "It was from Dudo-let or Dufo-lay, something," he says. "You know they all have these aliases."

Willingham has now agreed to file his expenses with the court and is ready to return about $4,000 the Yahoo-ers sent without his asking, if it proves to be more than he spent. He says that the posters' generosity strengthened his resolve to fight for them.

But Willingham's constituency isn't likely to hear much from him. In an odd twist for the Yahoo man, the stockholder committee he joined moved almost instantly to cut off the kind of communication that made Willingham one of its members.

Without permission from the larger committee, Willingham can't share information with his Yahoo friends. "They understand," he says.