This story by Christopher Byron (May 5, 1999) tells much more about Hamouth and Dunavant and the company:
msnbc.com
Corsaire's tangled tale
of snowboards and horsehair
Highflying OTC stock has changed names
almost as often as it changed direction
OPINION
By Christopher Byron
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
May 5 ? Here's a quick quiz for Internet investors: What do horse shampoo, snowboarding and 200 episodes of the old ?Lassie? TV show have to do with the joint Apollo-Soyuz space mission and high-technology video compression for the porno industry? If you can't figure it out, then clearly you don't understand what it takes to make an Over the Counter stock shoot the moon on Wall Street these days. The key ingredient: enough investors willing to believe what they read in press releases without doing even the most rudimentary research.
HOW ELSE TO explain the astonishing recent surge in the shares of Corsaire Snowboard, a hitherto-little-known Over the Counter bulletin board stock that has risen from less than $8 to more than $30 in the past five weeks. The fuel that powered its rise? Nothing but a blizzard of confusing and contradictory press releases about Corsaire and its grand plans to become a force in Internet high technology.
What Corsaire actually does ? or has done in the past, or hopes to do in the future ? is hard to nail down. The company has changed its name at least three times in recent years, most recently on May 3, when it dropped ?Corsaire Inc.? for the more Internet/techie-sounding ?Net Command Tech Inc.?
Nor is it wholly clear where Corsaire is actually located. Company press releases as far back as November describe it as ?Florida-based,? as does its Web site (www.netcommandtech.com). But a late-February company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists its executive offices at an address in San Diego. The company now maintains that it is really and truly located in Florida.
There is a phone number for a Corsaire in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to be sure. But the number connects only to an answering machine, from which messages are not returned. Directory assistance in San Diego lists no such company in the city or surrounding area. That is so even though its address ? Suite 333, No. 3838 Camino Del Rio North, San Diego ? is the same as that given in current SEC filings for two of its largest shareholders, as well as another bulletin board stock with high-tech pretensions: Global Telephone Communication Co.
Nor is it entirely clear who actually runs Corsaire. A November 1998 press release reported that William R. Dunavant had been appointed president and CEO to replace one Rene Hamouth, identified as Corsaire's ?previous president and CEO.?
But a press release six weeks later identified the new leader not as Dunavant, a man once hailed by Inc. magazine as ?Entrepreneur of the Year,? but as ?Roger Donavant.? And a month after that, Rene Hamouth ? who had supposedly long since stepped down as head of the company ? filed a document with the SEC that described him as Corsaire's ?president, treasurer and sole director.? The company now says Hamouth was indeed the president up to that point but that he stopped being so shortly thereafter.
As it happens, the address given by Hamouth in that filing is the same as that for the company itself: Suite 333, No. 3838 Camino Del Rio North, San Diego. Company press releases say Corsaire has offices in Los Angeles and London as well, but efforts to obtain addresses and phone numbers proved futile
The company claims, through press releases, to possess several breakthrough new technologies in digital compression and imaging. It is said to be able, among other things, to link as many as 16 remote desktop PCs for video, videoconferencing, and video e-mail over standard dial-up connections and telephone lines. Yet another product is said to be able to speed up the transmission rates of standard T-1 lines more than 100-fold. With Corsaire technology, any home can be turned into a ?virtual broadcasting station? at a cost of no more than $100 ? or so claim the press releases.
These claims appear to be little more than the latest outpourings of several fast-talking promoters who have been unsuccessfully flogging doubtful high-tech stories to the market for years. Now they've come together under the moniker of Net Command Tech Inc. to try again.
DUNAVANT'S HORSE TALE
The man in charge (if the press releases are to be believed) is one William R. Dunavant. Whether he intentionally misidentified himself as ?Roger Donavant? in a January 1999 press release in order to cover his tracks from past peccadilloes would be speculation. Contacted for this story, Dunavant said the spelling was a mistake and that the person who did it has been fired.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that ?Donavant? and ?Dunavant? are the same individual ? and there is also no doubt as to who that person is.
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Dunavant is the recipient of several business awards, including the accolade from Inc. as ?Entrepreneur of the Year? in 1995. But a simple search of the Lexis/Nexis news database reveals something else? that Dunavant won the praise for heading up a Pennsylvania company ? Straight Arrow Products ? that sold horse shampoo to humans on Dunavant's claim to reporters that it grew hair so fast he was constantly having to get haircuts.
A 1996 story in Forbes magazine called Dunavant a ?persuasive scoundrel who plundered the company,? citing a Pennsylvania court ruling that found him guilty of awarding himself millions in excessive compensation, siphoning off company funds to cover personal expenses and diverting Straight Arrow assets.
Dunavant says the story was one-sided and that he was in the midst of litigation at the time, so his lawyers refused to let him tell his side of the story. He says everything was settled amicably and the whole matter is now over and done with.
Dunavant left Straight Arrow not long afterward, resurfacing a year or so later at a convention of pornography Web site operators in Las Vegas, where he presented himself as president of a Fort Lauderdale company named Verinet Inc.
Dunavant worked the floor with a claim that Verinet had a technology that could ?squeeze? photos so they could be downloaded faster from porno Web sites. ?People want to see it, do it and get out of a site fast,? he told a reporter for a San Francisco newspaper covering the convention.
Whether anyone was impressed with his offering isn't known. But Dunavant also appears to have been wearing a second hat at around that time, as president of a Verinet-affiliated outfit, named Summus Technologies, also in Fort Lauderdale.
Not long afterward he began preparing his exit from both operations. A spokesman for an outside public relations firm that has been cranking out Corsaire's press releases says Dunavant left because he couldn't get along with an entrepreneur who had bought into the business.
That individual turns out to be Brad Richdale, a Florida infomercial maker who, according to the Corsaire PR man, bought an 18 percent stake in Summus in October via an outfit named Zzap Inc., which Richdale apparently either owned or controlled. Dunavant says Zzap is a ?multilevel marketing company? that took a stake in Summus to get marketing rights to its technology ? the same stuff Dunavant had been flogging at the porno show.
In any event, as part of this transaction, Zzap agreed to grant a license to the Summus technology (or at least something similar) to San Diego-based Corsaire Inc., the snowboard outfit. A month later Corsaire had hired Dunavant as CEO.
Dunavant says he immediately terminated the licensing deal with Zzap but soon had Corsaire competing in the digital communications field anyway. This created the bizarre situation in which an infomercial/multilevel marketing company and a snowboard company were trying to establish themselves in a high-tech corner of the Internet on the basis of a man with a background in the horse shampoo and porno business.
ENTER LASSIE
And how do those 200 episodes of ?Lassie? and the Apollo-Soyuz space mission enter the story? To answer that we need to peek behind the curtain of a Corsaire press release dated April 27. The release announced that Corsaire had acquired a Florida-based business (address not given) called Satellite Access Systems Inc. for 2.35 million shares of common stock. This is the acquisition that, according to the press release, has given Corsaire the ability to transfer data more than 100 times faster than what can be accomplished over a conventional T-1 line.
Maybe that's possible and maybe it isn't. But this much is not in doubt: The man who heads up Satellite Access Systems Inc. ? Glenn Kovar ? has an imagination as fertile as William Dunavant's back in his horse-shampoo-will-make-your-hair-grow days. It appears, for example, that before setting up Satellite Access Systems ? which is based in an office in St. Petersburg, Fla. ? Kovar worked as a $34,000-a-year director of a downtown redevelopment project in Dunedin, Fla., a position from which he was fired after city officials took a second look at his employment resume and found it full of wild embellishments.
Among Kovar's whoppers: that he had produced ?over 200 episodes of the ?Lassie' TV series?? when he had actually only worked as a consultant for the show while being employed by the U.S. Forest Service.
?It is not a pretty picture. We can't fix the past, and we can't explain some of what happened in an ethical way. We just want to have a clean record from here on out.'
? THOMAS HESS
Corsaire's lawyer That firing happened back in 1984, but a search of Lexis/Nexis shows that his imagination has, if anything, improved since then. A story about Kovar and his Satellite Access Systems startup appeared in the Tampa Bay Business Journal in 1997. The story quoted Kovar as having claimed in an interview with the Business Journal that he had worked as a special consultant for five U.S. presidents, though he hadn't, and that he had managed the joint Soviet-American Apollo-Soyuz space mission, when he hadn't.
So is any of what appears in the blizzard of press releases about Corsaire and its operations true? Who can say? The company itself is nearly three full years behind in filing financial statements with the SEC and shareholders, and though the company's outside PR person at Boardroom Communications says everything will be brought up to date by May 15, repeated requests to be provided in the meantime with even rudimentary financial information about the company or its acquisitions were turned down.
The company's lawyer, Thomas Hess, concedes that the company has had problems. He acknowledges, for example, a steady stream of misleading press releases went out claiming, among other things, that Dunavant was Corsaire's president, when in fact he was not.
?It is not a pretty picture,? says Hess. ?We can't fix the past, and we can't explain some of what happened in an ethical way. We just want to have a clean record from here on out.?
In fact, misleading press releases have continued to stream out as recently as a week ago, when the company declared that it had paid $28.8 million in stock to acquire 51 percent of the equity of a British outfit named Modern Telnet Ltd. But, said the press release, the deal gave Corsair ?100 percent? of Telnet's assets ? an accounting non sequitur. ?I don't know how that could happen,? agrees Hess.
In short, there may be a lot to Corsaire Inc., and, alternatively, there may be nothing at all. Meanwhile, the company simply asks that investors take everything on faith ? not bothering to point out that little about the company or those who run it would seem to warrant that faith.
Between Oct. 30 and last Monday, that faith carried Corsaire's stock price from 25 cents to $30 per share. In the two days since then the price has dropped by a third and is now back at $20.75. How much further it has to fall if Corsaire's grand plans don't pan out is easy enough to see ? 25 cents all over again |
