Multivision's Nazerali sues Deep Capture for defamation
2011-10-20 13:59 ET - Street Wire
by Mike Caswell
Vancouver stock promoter Altaf Nazerali has filed a defamation suit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia against short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne and journalist Mark Mitchell over material they published on the website deepcapture.com. Mr. Nazerali claims that the site portrays him as a criminal and a fraud artist, among other things. The site linked him with an Osama bin Laden associate and with members of the Mafia.
Mr. Nazerali's notice of claim, filed at the Vancouver courthouse on Wednesday, Oct. 19, identifies Mr. Byrne as a resident of Utah and Mr. Mitchell as a resident of Illinois. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant is Deep Capture LLC, the registered owner of the deepcapture.com website, which claims to expose wrongdoing in the markets.
According to the suit, Mr. Nazerali's name appears in several chapters that Mr. Mitchell wrote on the site which link him to Mafia figures, intelligence figures in Iran, and people with connections to Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi. The suit contains lengthy quotes from the chapters, the first of which is dated May, 2011. It describes how Mr. Nazerali received a call to assist somebody named "Kott" (a subsequent chapter mentions notorious 1970s stock promoter Irving Kott) in 1979 after a car bomb attack.
"Kott took some shrapnel but survived, and the first thing he did ... was call his friend, Ali Nazerali ... he wanted to know what the deal was with the car bomb," the chapter read. According to the passage, Mr. Nazerali informed him that a hit man who worked for Canadian mob boss Vic Controni had planted the bomb. "Nazerali offered to patch things up with the Mafia -- and he did a good job of it. Commissso ordered [the hit man] to lay off, and a couple of years later, Kott, Nazerali and the Mafia were all doing business together," the passage stated. Mr. Nazerali later participated in arms dealing and delivering weapons to war zones, it read.
Another chapter said that Mr. Nazerali was best known for "small-time 'pump-and-dump' scams, though he is involved in much bigger schemes ... such as bust-outs, death spiral finance, and naked short selling." According to that chapter, he once employed short-seller David Rocker, who had previously inspired Mr. Byrne to found Deep Capture.
Other chapters made even more criminal connections, the suit complains. One, dated July, 2011, stated that Mr. Nazerali was an important figure at Bank of Credit and Commerce International, "the massive criminal enterprise that did business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia to Colombian drug cartels." His business partners, as stated in the passage, included a number of criminal organizations as well as several individuals affiliated with Middle Eastern regimes. Among them were Mufti al Abbar, "chief market manipulator for Muammar Qadaffi," and "an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali's mobster friend Egor Chernov)."
The final chapter quoted in the suit accused Mr. Nazerali of perpetrating a stock fraud along with the head of Saudi intelligence, Anwar bin Abdul al-Aziz al Saud. The portion quoted in the suit provides no details of the fraud, other than to name the company, Even Resources.
According to Mr. Nazerali, the statements on the site contain many defamatory meanings. They are that Mr. Nazerali is a criminal, arms dealer, drug dealer, terrorist, fraud artist, gangster, mobster, member of the Mafia, dishonest, dangerous and not to be trusted. Mr. Mitchell is liable as the author of the statements and Mr. Byrne as the publisher, the suit states.
Also defendants are GoDaddy Inc., which registered the deepcapture.com domain name, and NoZone Inc., which hosts the website. The suit further names search provider Google Inc. and its Canadian subsidiary, which publishes a list of links to the defamatory statements along with brief quotes.
Mr. Nazerali is seeking a permanent injunction barring the defendants from defaming him. He is also seeking general, special, punitive and aggravated damages against Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Byrne, Deep Capture and a related company, High Plains Investments LLC. Vancouver lawyer Dan Burnett of Owen Bird Law Corp. filed the suit on Mr. Nazerali's behalf.
None of the defendants have responded to the suit.
While Mr. Nazerali has had roles with many junior companies, his only current role is as the president of Multivision Communications Corp., a mostly inactive TSX Venture Exchange listing.
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