AGIS..Truthseeker material? I'm not sure but the next few days could get interesting.
I mentioned AGIS a few weeks ago. They announced a "buy-out" offer where the common stock holders would get nothing...all the shares were to be cancelled. The stock dropped from around .06 to .01 and is now .006x.007. I mentioned that if the "deal" fell through, the stock could shoot back up to it's pre-announcement level.
The company called a special meeting of shareholders to vote on the deal tomorrow (Sept. 9th). Someone on Raging Bull posted the following article. I'm not sure if it's a disgruntled investor...or the truth...:::::
PHONE-BANK SELLOUT
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
September 8, 2003 -- STRANGE business deals pop up every day in this country. But one of the strangest by far involves a Texas-based telemarketing company called Aegis Communications Inc., which is being acquired by an offshore company called All- Serve systems PLC. The takeover is set to be finalized on Tuesday.
At first glance, this deal seems so small as not to be worth a second look. Yet there is far more to it than its $22.75 million price tag.
That's because a Washington, D.C., investment group that includes former Secretary of Defense William Cohen owns Aegis, a company with access to the most personal financial details of millions of American citizens. And the group agreed to sell it to a company that appears to be controlled by an international fugitive who had been negotiating to sell biological warfare software to Iraq as recently as October 2001.
Besides Cohen, you'll find plenty of other Washington biggies wiping egg from their faces in this fiasco, which is already hip-deep in misleading and incomplete press releases, stolen phone records and purloined identities.
We begin with the midsummer press release that announced the deal, describing AllServe as a "U.K.-based company with a global presence" - a statement that may or may not be true, but is certainly incomplete. In reality, All- Serve Systems is headquartered not in Britain but in New Delhi, India. Yet All- Serve is privately owned, so it is hard to know who's actually calling the shots at the company, wherever he may be hanging his hat.
Not even Aegis Communications' own chief information officer, one Angelo P. Macchia, seems to know who owns AllServe. "I haven't the slightest idea." he says.
Yet enough backtracking through name changes and corporate address filings in the United States and Europe will eventually bring one to a building in the English countryside called the Technology Transfer Centre.
And enough phoning around thereafter will sooner or later yield someone able to begin clearing up the mystery of who is really behind AllServe Systems.
From a Greenwich, Conn., investment banker named Christopher Sinclair, who helped found a company called Scandent Group BV that has offices in the Centre, comes news that the mysterious Mr. AllServe is most likely a fellow named Dinesh Dalmia.
Scandent had recently purchased a variety of business assets from a Dalmia-controlled company called DSQ, and Sinclair said AllServe is a renamed DSQ business that he, Sinclair, is "almost positive" Dalmia still controls. There is plenty of corroborating evidence in various databases to support him.
So who's Dalmia, and what's DSQ? Indian press reports identify Dalmia as the managing director of DSQ Software, a computer programming company that has been at the center of a spreading securities fraud scandal on the Calcutta Stock Exchange for the last two years. Numerous stories, some as fresh as two weeks ago, say Dalmia fled India last year to escape answering charges in the case, and that he's hiding out in the United States. A news story in June 2002 said he had begun converting his business to a worldwide "call center" operation. The conversion now seems set to swallow up the Aegis operation.
MEANWHILE, The Post has learned that call centers are not the only business opportunity in which Dalmia may have been recently involved. According to a series of October 2001 e-mails between Dalmia and an associate in the United Arab Emirates, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein wanted to buy a variety of custom software packages from DSQ, including biological warfare management programs, intelligence analysis packages and a system to set up and manage a "training center."
It is unclear whether a contract was ever signed, though the final e-mail in the series discusses arrangements for travel visas to Iraq.
It gets worse, for Aegis is no pipsqueak operation. It is in fact the sixth-largest U.S. telemarketing company, with 4,500 employees manning banks of phones and computer screens at 11 different facilities across the country.
And Aegis isn't just a telemarketing company either. Faced with Washington's evident determination to deal with telemarketers the way Rudy Giuliani dealt with the squeegee people, Aegis Communications long ago began shifting into a different line of work. As a result, 75 percent of the company's business today comes from what the company calls "contact management."
What this amounts to is subcontracting out most of those 4,500 employees - many of whom work for $25,000 a year or less - to handle the queries and complaints of people who phone up their credit card company or phone company to discuss a bill, verify a payment or gripe about an overcharge.
When a call comes in it gets automatically routed to an Aegis phone rep, who can reach right into the corporate client's own computer system and access the caller's records. Aegis's clients range from AT&T and the regional Bells to American Express, Discover, Visa, Mastercard and others.
It is hard to think of a single other choke-point in the economy where so much sensitive financial and personal information, on so many millions of everyday citizens could be accessed so easily - and, it seems, so casually - by thousands of $12.50-per-hour phone reps.
I experienced the inevitable result firsthand a year ago, when my own AT&T phone records were stolen from Aegis's Irving, Texas, call center. And I am hardly the only one who has been victimized in this way. In Detroit, federal prosecutors spent 18 months investigating a 20-member, $2 million credit card ring before finally shutting it down in April 2000. The network had been using information stolen from computerized American Express customer account files by three Aegis Communications phone reps who worked in the Irving call center.
The reason Aegis's stock now sells for a half-cent per share is that the company's business is highly labor intensive, and no matter how little management pays its armies of subsistence-wage phone reps, the cost structure is still too high.
THIS has clearly come as a shock to the politically greased Thayer Capital Partners fund in Washington, which owns just over half of Aegis's stock and has been bankrolling the business for years. Thayer's "Board of Advisors" includes former Secretary Cohen, former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, former NASD Chairman Frank Zarb, former American Express Chairman James Robinson, and Bill Clinton's former Monica Lewinsky fix-it guy, Vernon Jordan.
And there are plenty of red faces at the Questor Partners Fund as well. That group pumped nearly $47 million of its own into Aegis at the end of 1999, only to see it all disappear. Together, Thayer Capital and Questor control Aegis, and in an effort to climb back out of the hole they've dug for themselves, they've decided to sell their headache to the Indian fugitive Dalmia.
If this deal goes through, and Aegis Communications is taken over by some mysterious moneyman from Bombay or Calcutta (if he hasn't already gone to ground in Jackson Heights), you may be sure he'll start cutting those subsistence-level phone-rep wages even more - causing even more of these desperate, frightened and underpaid staffers to begin looking through their computers in search of information they can rip off and sell.
And when it comes time to look for someone to blame for letting all this happen, no one will have the faintest idea who to look for. Who's buying this company? The words of Aegis's chief information officer linger in the air: "I haven't the slightest idea." Well now he does - and so do you. This deal should be stopped, period |
