THE UPCOMING BETRAYAL
A lot of people, myself included, bought into the PLNI runup last August and September
based on what appeared to be a real company in the process of growing and expanding by making a series of prudent acquisitions. In all the hubbub and excitement most of us, again myself included, chose to overlook the fact that this was a pink sheet company which hadn’t filed financials any time within memory and on which little or no real information existed.
What we had bought into was one of the cleverest pump and dump operations to come along since the big crash back in 2000. I guess it’s been long enough for many of us to forget the debacles of the “irrational exhuberance” era. It’s always tempting to believe that some penny stock operator with a lot of promises is going to make us rich.
After the runup to approximately .02 per share the stock was allowed to drift down to its current level of .005 to.006 where the market makers are maintaining a steady price level which they can easily afford to do since most of them probably stocked up for the P&D run when this thing was still selling at .0001 and most likely they made a ton of money on the runup as did PLNI company officials. It could be, and this is my hope and the only hope for those of us who bought in on the August/September runup, that this group might just be greedy and stupid enough to go back to the well one more time. After all they’ve been promising audited financials since December of 2004 without delivering and yet there are those who still believe and argue on their behalf. Oh, and please don’t bring up the acquisitions as the reason for the delay, they didn’t acquire Pro-Mold and Semco until late in 2005. They could have bought out General Motors and the audit would not have taken this long.
What I am afraid is the next step in this P&D scenario is the usual device for stealing stockholder equity, a REVERSE SPLIT. Oh, not some little 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 split; a real big one, 80 or 100 to 1. Of course there will be the usual promises of stockholder bonuses and the like but the reality is that the stock will quickly sink back to .005/6 after a brief increase simply because the market has no reason to support a higher price. So if you bought 1,000,000 at .01 it cost you $10,000. After the split and price decline you now have 10,000 shares at .005, now worth $500. Someone pockets your $9500 and walks away laughing. Then, if you’re a real moron, you sell them your remaining 10,000 shares and they have it all. This reminds me of Lenny Bruce’s joke about lawyers.
This might sound like sour grapes or a lot of hand-wringing but the fact is I was one of PLNI’s biggest cheerleaders when it looked like they were going to deliver on their promises. The fact is that they’ve been given plenty of time and they not only haven’t delivered but they’ve gone back on things they promised they WOULDN’T do like diluting the float. This was a can’t lose proposition for them since they knew all along that they were going to do a reverse split and what the outcome would be. As I said previously this is the point where they walk away laughing with your money in their pockets.
So what to do? You certainly aren’t going to fly your lawyer to Lexington, Kentucky to file a lawsuit againt PLNI. There are 2 things they absolutely can’t stand to have happen. The first is adverse publicity. This would drive the price of the stock so low that an R/S would neither be feasible or profitable, or at least not as profitable as they hoped. Second, and don’t laugh, there are the regulatory agencies and people like Eliot Spitzer who delight in making examples of these types of manipulators. I’m the same age as Jim Turek and the idea of spending even 6 months in jail would fill me with terror. A longer sentence would be a death sentence. The SEC has been taking a well deserved pounding lately and maybe they would like to be taken seriously again by nailing a few people. AND, they have the power to take away all the ill-gotten gains.
If you’re in the same boat I’m in all I’m asking you to do is read this over a few times and give it due consideration. This battle is far from over and this war is far from lost.
I’m certain I’ll be attacked from all quarters but after the dust clears the facts about PLNI are there for all to see. Open you eyes and prepare to do something to protect yourself. |
