More of the blatant attempt to get you to sell your shares and let the shorts win this battle.
I am sick of it!
Riley G
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To: Jeffrey C. Garland (12818 )
From: ptm, inc Tuesday, Nov 4 1997 8:09PM EST
Reply #12838 of 12922
TROUBLED WATERS
Stock scam allegations leveled at Ten Sleep bottler
Monday November 4, 1997
By TOM MORTON,Star-Tribune staff writer copyright 1997, Casper Star-Tribune
TEN SLEEP-Rocky Mountain Crystal Water, Inc. whose lone employee works part-time in its small, drab green building on the outskirts of this town of 311, occasionally bottles and ships the tasty artesian water that flows from the Madison Formation in the nearby Big Horn Mountain.
This quiet town, and even quieter bottling plant, are at the center of an alleged nationwide stock scam, according to an investor who says the company's owners have defrauded him, will defraud other investors, and will give Wyoming a bad name.
"It's air," Dempsey Mork said of the bottling company's stock promotion.
The company, Rocky Mountain International Ltd., has issued or taken options to issue as many as 19.6 million shares for a bottling plant with total assets of $200,000, Mork said from his home in Indian Wells, Calif.
If you divide the shares into the company's actual assets, they would be worth 1 cent each, he said.
Discussion of Rocky Mountain International has racked up more than 12,000 postings on the Internet since Oct. 1 as investors have traded hundreds of thousands of shares, priced at $2.94 on the Over The Counter Bulletin Board, an electronic stock trading method.
The traded words and traded shares mark the symptoms of "an ongoing stock scam" by the company's owners who inflate the value of the firm to
sell stock to unsuspecting investors, Mork charged.
Rocky Mountain International Ltd., of Littleton, Colo., claims it's worth $16 million, not counting an additional $5 million it needs to raise to capitalize the operation, according to Securities and ExchangeCommission documents.
"This has to be the only $16 million water bottling water company in the world with one employee," Mork said.
Mork said his interest arose after being deceived into entering an agreement with an acquaintance of company owners to sell 100,000 shares
of the company, previously known as Olympus Ventures in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when it was priced at about 20 cents a share.
Because company officials and their friends using the Internet allegedly manipulated the value of the stock in a company with little real market value, Mork estimates that he's out as much as $280,000.
So he's sued Rocky Mountain International officials in a California State court for fraud, stock manipulation, conspiracy, breach of contract, and violation of securities laws, he said.
However, Olympus Ventures officials Gary Morgan and Roland Breton accuse Mork of engaging in his own version of stock manipulation by making false statements to downplay the value of company shares.
"We're a very small company, a very healthy little growing company, and he's been a very damaging person to us," said Morgan, the company's chief executive officer.
So Olympus Ventures has sued him in federal court for defamation, unfair business practices and conspiracy, he said. The company, Morgan
added, hasn't been served with Mork's suit.
Mork responded that the suit hasn't been served on Breton and Morgan because of serious questions about whether Olympus Ventures legally exists in Washington, the state of its incorporation.
These and other issues about Rocky Mountain International attract hundreds of comments a day on the Internet. Investors calling themselves the "cartel" promote the company as a small firm trying to succeed in the face of alleged manipulation by Mork and others. A group
of self-named "Naysayers" question the company's business practices.
Both sides said they've reported each other's activities to the SEC, the federal agency that governs the registration, publication of information, and sale of securities.
However, the SEC does not comment on whether firms are under investigation, said Fred Chavez, senior special counsel in the enforcement, division of the commission's office in Denver.
And Tom Cowan, director of the securities division of the Wyoming Secretary of State's Office, said the company has generated neither complaints nor an investigation.
Meanwhile, residents here said they're unaware of the controversy.
Three years ago, the town signed an exclusive agreement with Rocky Mountain Crystal Water to sell its surplus water from the Big Horn Mountains for $1,000 a month, former mayor Merle Funk said. (See
related story.)
The plant sporadically produced pallets of bottled water with manual equipment, shipped them statewide and as far away as Taiwan and Mexico, and sometimes ran two shifts, according to residents and plant office manager and sole employee Alex Lockhart. The plant has done little business recently, Lockhart said.
Morgan said Monday that the plant is inactive.
But the Oct. 1 Business Wire announcement of the merger between Olympus Ventures and Rocky Mountain Crystal Water quotes Morgan saying: "With Rocky Mountain Crystal Water's existing business and future contracts this merger will be an exciting and profitable experience for all of
us."
Mork said the nonexistent business coupled with Morgan's hype reveals a pattern of Olympus Ventures' buying troubled companies and pumping up the prices.
Mork accused Morgan and Breton of using the inflated prices "to fabricate a phony balance sheet so it could sell shares to unsuspecting investors."
They also have swindled investors by issuing themselves enormous amounts of shares after acquiring these companies, most recently after
the Sept. 24 merger with Rocky Mountain Crystal Water, Mork said.
Potential investors, he said, won't know about Rocky Mountain International's small size just by looking at the 8-K form - an SEC report required within 15 days of a major transaction such as a buyout.
The 8-K states: "The principal assets of Rocky Mountain include inventory, accounts receivable, and equipment, which will continue to be used as at present; licenses for water rights to extract and produce
artesian water from its source in the Big Horn mountains of Wyoming; and cash."
According to Morgan and the unaudited combined balance sheet included in the 8-K, the total assets of $16,010,431 are composed of $281,013 in current assets, $14.0 million in stocks, $1,641,603 in fixed assets, and $87,815 in other assets.
However, Mork said the 8-K mentions nothing about the company owning securities.
Morgan and the 8-K also said Rocky Mountain International is negotiating with a private, unnamed investor for an additional $5
million in cash for the company for expansion of the water bottling plant and the garment industry.
The $5 million cash infusion should become final "literally within minutes," Morgan said Monday.
Mork said most investors don't know that the 8-K states that the deal is off if Rocky Mountain International doesn't raise the $5 million.
Such statements, Morgan said, illustrate Mork's damaging influence on their company.
Mork has posted statements on the Internet asserting stock manipulation by Olympus Ventures and Rocky Mountain International Ltd., according to
a Sept. 25 news release from Olympus issued on the Internet's Yahoo Business Wire.
"Mork has a history of such behavior," Morgan said in an interview. He's influenced the market to devalue four other public companies,
taking their shares from $7 plus down to $2 or less over a 12 month period, Morgan charged. "He destroys small companies - that's what he does for a living."
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To: Jimbo (12836 )
From: ptm, inc Tuesday, Nov 4 1997 8:12PM EST
Reply #12840 of 12923
Casper Star-Tribune
MONDAY NOVEMBER 4,1997 FOUNDED 1891
By TOM MORTON, Star-Tribune staff writer copyright 1997, Casper Star-Tribune
TEN SLEEP - Three years of broken promises haven't drowned this town's hope that a bottling plant could jump start the economy and provide
jobs, residents say.
But Rocky Mountain Crystal Water's behavior, even after its Sept. 24 merger with a firm in Florida, hasn't endeared the company to Ten Sleep, either, they said.
"They're sitting there spinning their wheels," Mayor Pat Beckley said.
Company officials called Beckley on Monday and told him that they'd be visiting him by the end of the month to discuss future plans, he said.
But even if the company does go somewhere, it also must contend with the risks of a highly competitive industry with a heavy product to ship and a slim profit margin, the president of a competing Casper bottling firm said.
Casper, added Hillcrest Water President George Baker, is much closer to markets and highways than Ten Sleep.
This town on U.S. Highway 16, halfway between Worland on the west and Powder River Pass in the Big Horn Mountain on the east, bills itself as "A Little Western Town with A Big Western Heart."
The struggles and hopes of Ten Sleep - an agricultural community that wants to keep its character while serving growing numbers of tourists and hunters - mirror on a small scale those elsewhere in economically stagnant Wyoming.
But it's got something for which towns and cities in the West will go to political war: water.
Millions of gallons of pure, clear, untreated, unchlorinated water that gushes from the Madison Formation in the
mountains directly to two wells 1,100 feet deep near the Town Hall.
Water so plentiful that most households don't have meters and pay a flat rate of $20 a month.
Merle Funk, mayor from 1992 to 1994, saw clear gold in the nearby hills, and wondered if both the town and an enterprising company would care to make some money, he said.
So in the fall of 1992, Ten Sleep took out an ad in the trade publication Bottle Water Reporter, Fund said.
Several firms responded, but only Colorado Clearwater of Littleton, Colo., expressed its
willingness to set up shop without the help of local or
state economic developments funds, he said.
By 1994, an attorney hired by the town researched Colorado Clearwater and reported that it was legitimate, Funk said.
So Ten Sleep and the company, which did business as Rocky Mountain Crystal Water, signed a 99-year contract in August 1994, he said.
Ten Sleep granted the exclusive right to bottle its unused water, according to the contract signed by company President Michael Puhr.
Rocky Mountain Crystal Water agreed to buy a minimum of 50,000 gallons a month at two cents a gallon, which would net Ten Sleep an extra $1,000 a month - welcome money for a town with a $260,000 budget, according to the contract and Funk.
Rocky Mountain Crystal Water bought a former 3,000-square-foot veterinary clinic, installed manual bottling equipment, printed labels
and began bottling water, Funk said.
While Ten Sleep likes the easy money, Funk and other residents said it hasn't been as pleased with Rocky Mountain Crystal Water's inability to fulfill other parts of the bargain.
The company promised to hire up to 50 people at between $8 and $10 an hour, Funk said. "For a town like this, that's great. There's people who drive 30 miles to Worland who don't make that kind of money."
For a while, the plant ran two shifts bottling water: The Ten Sleep product called Rocky Mountain Crystal Water and sold as far away as
Taiwan and Mexico; water trucked from Woods Landings bottled as Cheyenne Springs; and a temporary sports water product called Merlin Micromagic-fortified with "extra electrolytes. Then we active the water with natural fields of energy."
Over the summer business slowed to a trickle, Funk said.
Now, office manager Alex Lockhart is only employee, she said.
Rocky Mountain Crystal Water also promised to build a new plant, according to the contract.
Beckley, said that Roy Decker & Sons in Worland signed a contract with Rocky Mountain Crystal Water two years ago to build a 7,000square foot building. Constructions commenced with a concrete slab.
But the bottling company never paid for framing, so Decker dismantled the steel framing, Beckley said.
Beckley, Funk and other residents also said Rocky Mountain Crystal Water keeps a low corporate profile in the community by rarely helping
sponsor community events.
That profile is so low that the company doesn't even have a sign at its building at 97 Second St.
Rocky Mountain Crystal Water entered a new phase Sept. 24 when the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., firm of Olympus Ventures signed a merger agreement and reorganized the company as Rocky Mountain International Ltd.
Purr, now president of RockyMountain International's bottling division, said $5 million in cash the company plans to raise will help expand the plant with a high-speed bottling line.
According to the Washakie County Assessor's Office, the current total estimated fair market value of the bottling plant and land amounts to
$201,014 - $69,504 for the land and $131,510 for the building, equipment and other improvements.
Roland Breton, president of Rocky Mountain International, said expansion should begin in lateNovember, and completion of the project should be completed four months later.
Beckley said he welcomes any proposed expansion.
But Rocky Mountain International, he said, didn't help its cause when it drafted a testimonial letter about the company calling it an "important member of our community" addressed to Puhr and asked that Beckley sign it.
On advice of the town's attorney, Beckley said he refused to sign it.
Rocky Mountain International also faces challenges inherent in the highly competitive bottled water industry, said Baker of Hillcrest
Water.
Even with the location and transportation infrastructure advantages it enjoys, Hillcrest has a profit margin of only 2 percent, Baker said.
"Freight is just the killer," he said. |
