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Non-Tech : Thom Calandra, CBS Marketwatch and IVAN - Exposing the TRUTH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (42)	11/10/2003 7:29:04 PM
From: Pluvia	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 167

'And keep in mind there's a historical record of Friedland paying people to (illegally) promote his companies...' take it fwiw... but if you add that to the other numerous incidences and... as far as where IVAN goes... look, most importantly people need to have their eyes open. he could possibly raise cash in a creative way, then get lucky and hit a few good wells. but he's not taking ANY risk, he's just bullshitting investors with borderline fraud imo. he's a promoter, and imo a liar, and if he raises 500mm and finds nothing, he'll be fine the shareholders will have nothing... again... a good example, the deep gas well they drilled in cali that went 50% over budget for around 15mm... and looks to be non productive... or the 3 wells in east texas where the IVAN pr claimed the neighbor had 100% success - hit on all wells drilled.. but all 3 IVAN wells look to be non-productive... moles.org But Friedland's best connections are not with dictators. No, his real buddies are his contacts in the crooked financial worlds of Toronto and Vancouver who help him orchestrate the spectacular rise in the price of his stocks such as Frank Mersch, a senior portfolio manager at Toronto-based Altamira Investment Services Incorporated. Mersch was heavily involved in promoting a Friedland-controlled penny mining stock, Vengold Incorporated, in which he controlled between 10 and 40 percent of the stock over an 11-month period in 1993. Later he took over a company called Dass No. 25 Holdings Limited, that got cheap stock in a venture that eventually became Diamond Fields Resources Incorporated. Questioned by the Ontario Securities Commission about his role in Dass, Mersch claimed he had no stake in the company. Subsequently when this was found to be untrue, he was suspended from trading for six months in June 1998.71 An even better example is First Marathon Securities, which underwrote the public offering of Indochina Goldfields shares. Forbes magazine revealed that in the two years before the offering, five employees of First Marathon were invited to participate in a series of private placements, enabling them to buy stock at heavily discounted prices. One broker, Robert Hartvikson, invested $1.29 million, buying stock at $1, $2 and $5 a share. Another broker, Eric Savics, invested $382,500 at $1 and $2 a share. Michael Vitton, an institutional sales specialist at Nesbitt Burns, bought 120,000 shares at $1.66. By the time Indochina Goldfields went public at C$15, these investors had made millions between them in their personal accounts. Friedland also has friends in the newsletter business. Three newsletter editors-James Blanchard, Bob Bishop and Adrian Day-got cheap stock in Indochina Goldfields in a 1994 private placement. They each invested $100,000 at $2 a share. Forbes also points out that Friedland cut himself an even sweeter deal. In February 1994 he lent $3 million to Indochina Goldfields for "general corporate purposes." Later that year he was repaid with 16.78 million shares-valued at C25 cents per share. By the time of the share offering Friedland's 16.78 million shares had a paper worth of nearly $186 million. That's not all. In 1994 Indochina Goldfields bought a 50% stake in the Monywa copper mine in Myanmar. The seller: Robert Friedland. According to Indochina Goldfields' prospectus, he had spent $4.36 million on the property. In March 1996 Indochina Goldfields reimbursed him for this expense with 5 million shares which would have been worth some $75 million when the company went public.