I earn my living on Wall Street by researching companies I believe to be long on hype and short on substance. Some of the companies I research go beyond hype. Over 30 of the companies I have researched were ultimately discovered to be frauds. They include some of the largest recent Internet and telecom scams. The business press published our opinions about these companies long before their falls.
One of the smallest, least consequential, and most hyped and troubling companies I have researched is headquartered in Philadelphia and headed by Dr. William A. Carter. Hemispherx Biopharma Inc. has been ordered by regulators to stop promoting its drug, Ampligen, because it never had been approved for marketing anywhere despite 30 years of experimentation. It was taken public by Wall Street basement-level brokers who were later criminally convicted of securities fraud, money laundering and stock price manipulation. My research on this company is available on the Internet.
[...]
Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Albert W. Sheppard ruled in favor of Hemispherx and against me in nearly every pre-trial ruling. He made a dubious ruling on jurisdiction even though I hadn't even been in Philadelphia for 20 years and then decided that Hemispherx would be treated as a private plaintiff in his courtroom, even though it is a public company and despite the importance of public debate about the safety of its product. As an added bonus, Sheppard ruled that I could not mention many of the facts my research had uncovered; I was on trial for giving an opinion and was unable to show the jury the factual basis of my opinion.
Despite the "Sheppard-handicap," I won the jury's verdict on every single point. Then, 12 days before this paper published a story about the trial, Sheppard ordered a new trial. The story calls Sheppard a problem solver and me a problem Sheppard could not solve. What problem did Sheppard need to solve? Are there too many analysts warning investors of possible problems? Who is the problem? An individual who offers the public his opinion or a judge whose aggressive anti-free speech rulings precluded a full airing of the facts about this company?
Sunday, August 18, 2002
This letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer tells an interesting story of an investment analyst getting slapped with lawsuits and confronted with an unfriendly judge and an unfriendly media.