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Biotech / Medical : Biotime-Nasdaq's best kept secret? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Roof who wrote (1150)	10/26/1998 8:40:00 PM
From: BulbaMan	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1432

Here's a copy of the e-mail I sent Mark Veverka, author of today's S.F. Chronicle hit piece on BioTime. Mark, You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a one-sided piece on BioTime in today's (10/26/98) S.F. Chronicle. 1) Why didn't you include a response to Asensio's attack from BioTime? Your claim that "BioTime officials were unavailable" is absurd. The BioTime people have made numerous responses to Asensio's similarly distorted claims in the past, which you could have printed. Or, you could have waited until BioTime officials were available. Is it possible you didn't wait because you were in a rush to get your hit piece in the paper the same day Asensio put out his own press release smearing BioTime? Or, was it just a coincidence that your hit piece appeared jointly with Asensio's? And was it just another coincidence that your 4/29/98 piece trashing BioTime in the Wall Street Journal (California Edition) also appeared the same day as an Asensio press release attacking BioTime. 2) Why no mention of the Abbott Laboratories connection to BioTime? After all, they did give BioTime $1 million when they licensed Hextend last year. And, in Abbott's recent 10/8/98 conference call, they declared Hextend's potential market "could be 40 or 50 million to $300 to $400 million." Abbott also said that "It's difficult for us to make any predictions at this time until we see what the label looks like. We think that this could be a nice modest contributor for us." So, if Abbott believes there's a chance Hextend will be a $300 to $400 million product, why not let readers know this rather than just propagate Asensio's view that Hextend is certain to fail? 3) Why no mention of the fairly substantial investment in BioTime by funds managed by Alfred D. Kingsley and Gary K. Duberstein? As you must know, Kingsley and Duberstein are well- known, big-time Wall Street investors and their 5/98 13D SEC filing shows their investment group holds 1,269,855 BioTime shares. Also, according to their SEC Form 4 filings, from 5/14- 6/18/98, the Kingsley and Duberstein group picked up another 54,300 shares of BioTime at a price range of $6-$8.50 per share. Yet, your piece implies that only naive individual investors have been "silly" enough to buy BioTime and "no institutional fund worth its salt would get near this puppy." 4) Why do you portray Asensio as a hero protecting small investors from greedy stock manipulators, choosing to ignore the fact that others hold a very contrary opinion of his motives? I assume you're aware that another company targeted by Asensio, the Amex-listed Hemispherx, recently filed a lawsuit alleging "that Asensio & Company and its co-conspirators established short positions of more than 2 million shares, then pursued an aggressive media, federal mail and Internet campaign to disseminate false and misleading information intended to drive down the Hemispherx share price and to create profits on the short sellers' positions." The Hemispherx press release announcing the lawsuit further states: "As part of the scheme, the co-conspirators allegedly formed fraudulent brokerage clients and phantom accounts in the U.S. and in foreign countries in an attempt to mask their illegal trading activities and to evade U.S. taxes. Most of these allegedly fraudulent operations publicized different names and phone numbers for their trading operations but resided at the same Asensio & Company-related address." I could go on, but if I haven't convinced you by now to print the other side of the story I never will.