This is a tale with many ironies.
M+ will remember the days when he and I we were relentlessly assailed on the Yahoo boards. It was obvious that at least one of the assailants was a proxy to an OVRL insider. I believe what they were doing was clearly illegal. A lot of what was posted should have been announced in conjunction with SEC filings, not through manipulative leaks on Yahoo, IH, SH, etc.
I was working in the industry, and had known one of the OVRL founders since 1980. I had spent some thirty years working either for or with one of their competitors. The OVRL stock had fallen so low that I was considering buying the company, selling a couple of lines of business off to competitors, and picking the carcass for the profitable cost centers (mostly service contracts).
I abandoned Yahoo because they revised their bull board, and the new format breached the identities of those who posted - it showed their account names instead of their board monikers.
Originally, the OVRL participation from CALPERS was the biggest public fraud, although I give no quarter to California's intrinsic governmental corruption and incompetence. I believe CALPERS motives in buoying up EK were highly political.
What was more remarkable was that CCP then filled their void, and persisted for years in effecting scheme after scheme. I know they defrauded many public investors, but probably defrauded themselves even more. It is not conceivable that they weren't fully on board with the shotgun (plural) marriage with serial conman Sheldon Iwentash and relentless a-hole PT Barnum. I actually believe the original Glassware developer and the folks at HVE were as much victims of the con as anyone. (I know some of you disagree with me on this). Their development efforts were probably legitimately undertaken (perhaps naively), and it was there lives, hopes and dreams they were investing only to have their works prematurely hyped and conflated beyond all reason. They had come up with a new drive shaft design, and PT Barnum promoted it as if it were a Ferrari ready for sale. Few succeed in their industry, but their fate was sealed as soon as PT Barnum and EK entered their lives. They never had a chance at legitimacy.
PT Barnum genuinely deserves a lifetime ban from public companies (and staring at steel bars would be justified). I believe that CCP is culpable in the fraud, and the SEC should be all over them, as well as their phony, captive Luxembourg bank. Freidheim & Co. make Paul Manafort look like a saint. I also believe that they had to take back the losses they tried to unload on Opus Bank because not doing so would have invited a federal investigation that would have likely resulted in criminal charges.
In the interest of full disclosure, I only owned their stock for a handful of days (on the hunch that they were going to continue with yet another fraudulent quarterly results release, which they proceeded to do), walked away with a profit of just over $800, and decided it wasn't worth it - there are a lot better ways to make that little money.
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