Roddy Boyd of the NY Post had an article out today that exposed the fact that Biovail had been doing investigation (or rather the private detectives hired by their attorneys had) for a year.
You can read the piece here.
Some of my favorite bits:
"After a recent Post investigation, Biovail said last month that
private investigators had dogged one of the men only once, to verify his address.
But documents obtained by The Post indicate that Biovail used private detectives to shadow these stock analysts even before it filed a lawsuit against one in February."
Huh. So let me see if I have this straight. Before filing a record $4.6 billion lawsuit alleging a highly organized and complex manipulation scheme, the attorneys may have been doing diligence on those they believed were a major part of the scheme before they filed the suit?
That's shocking.
The very idea that anyone would file a suit like that and have investigators verifying that there were grounds to go forward beforehand is appalling. I think that all lawsuits over $4 billion should involve the defendants and plaintiffs swatting each other with Nerf (tm) bats, and prevented from doing anything more forceful than firing water pistols in each others' general direction.
The notion that they would actually have done the sort of investigation that any remedially competent corporate group would do, well, er, is just bad. Bad bad bad. How dare they.
More Post:
"Jerry Treppel, a former Banc of America analyst suing Biovail and its chairman, Eugene Melnyk in a separate action, has claimed that his trash was repeatedly stolen in November and December.
On March 3, when The Post broke the news of Biovail's use of surveillance against legal foes, Biovail insisted the incidents were isolated and used only for fact gathering."
Wow. Trash stealing. I mean, that is really invasive. It's not like the guy was THROWING HIS SH#T AWAY AND LEAVING IT TO BE HAULED AWAY BY THE GARBAGE MAN, or anything. No. Tut tut. Apparently that was privileged garbage. I can see why that would suck.
I mean, imagine if someone came and stole my garbage. I wouldn't have to pay a garbage man, for one thing. That, and anything I threw away, might be used against me. That bootleg copy of Mother Juggs and Speed on Beta, the copies of Gerbil Monthly, the 'lil GW books with cartoons drawn in the borders, my invaluable notes on the musical version of "Memento" I've been working on...all now in the hands of attorneys. I shudder. It's so....invasive. Much better if the garbage men or the guys at the dump are sorting through it.
It's an outrage, I say.
What has the world come to when attorneys are reduced to going through garbage? Actually, that is a recurring fantasy of mine, but I digress.
The point is that allegedly taking someone's garbage is clearly bad, especially if they have set it out at the curb. Isn't that illegal? Huh. Apparently it isn't...BECAUSE IT'S GARBAGE - Ahhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Sorry.
I've spent many hours trying to keep my dogs from going through my neighbors' garbage. So I can sympathize that attorneys might make even more of a mess.
But now my favorite:
"A Biovail spokesman strongly denied that anyone photographed or removed mail from the Maris home."
But did they photograph the mailbox? Or the mail man? Did anyone even ask?
This is how "journalists" try to get you to think the subjects might have done whatever the journalist is saying was denied, when the journalist is too cowardly to say so outright.
They may also have denied that they sacrificed a Christian baby in a midnight ceremony atop the stolen garbage, or that they secretly overthrew the former Soviet Union, or that they were currently undergoing psychiatric treatment or were under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they were removing the garbage.
That's because they didn't, or weren't. And it is a really sleazy way to try to infer that they were. We've seen that before, though. It is apparently a stylistic thing.
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Anyone catch the seemingly endless articles this weekend about how 60 Minutes got everything all wrong, and how bad Biovail is and how good the hedge funds are?
It's almost as though an organized disinformation campaign is in play.
But what are the odds that a multi-billion dollar hedge fund would do that? Please. The thought is as ludicrous as journalists accessing hatchet job research reports real time via the internet and disseminating them via their columns even as the research company representative is claiming on national TV that reporters only got the reports 2-4 weeks after they came out.
Herb, you listening? Wanna explain how you were quoting the now infamous Feb. 14, 2005 Gradient report on NFI the same day it was released? I mean, was the Gradient person lying on national TV to Charles Gasparino when she said that? Because either she was, or she actually meant, "most of the time that is the case, except for when it provably wasn't, which is only the times you catch us lying."
So anyway, the spin machine is in full roar.
And the Post is leading with the cutting edge.
Have a good weekend, all.