Details of Dick Weir/EEStor interview leak emerge
I have a story in today’s Toronto Star about the leak nearly three weeks ago of a 38-minute telephone interview with EEStor founder and CEO Dick Weir. As others in the blogosphere have speculated, the audio recording that appeared on Yahoo Video (apologies, but in the story I incorrectly say it was on YouTube) was in fact a recording of a conference call between Dick Weir, representatives of ZENN, and representatives of Paradigm Capital and at least one of their institutional investor clients. Paradigm, which was co-leading a recent equity offering for ZENN, facilitated the call.
The president of Paradigm confirmed what happened but said it’s not known how the recording made it onto the Internet. ZENN, meanwhile, is arguing that the information within the interview is not material or was disclosed previously, so while the leak is embarrassing it’s not breaking any rules. Of course, I’m sure many of you out there who have heard the recording or read the script would beg to differ. It will be interesting to see how this controversy unfolds, and whether financial regulators in Canada decide to look into it further.
Tags: Dick Weir, EEStor, Paradigm Capital, ZENN
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
August 8th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
There are many pertinent items there. Imminent UL certification is a very big deal. A capacitor getting tested and its energy storage measured by September will be huge. The closeness of EEStor’s relationship with three Lockheed Martin divisions. Locking up a Nevada barium mine’s production is pertinent as it speaks to EEStor’s earnestness. And that’s just off the top of my head.
August 9th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Yes the reason for the leak is also interesting was it Zenn trying to get around its restrictive NDA ? Was it a mysterious blog poster that has previously released documents from Eestor/Zenn ?
Was it someone from the Equity firms trying to give there customers a little boost ?
Was it a pump and dumper, though the dump side is a little late now ?
Mark
August 9th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
There are 2 possibilities, in the Eestor Bunny story:
1-this is the biggest real story since, I don’t know, the invention of the transistor? The invention of the electric light bulb?
2-this is the most interesting scam since Paul Newman and Robert Redford paired up, for The Sting
August 10th, 2009 at 8:12 am
I hope regulators take a good look at Zenn and its relationship with EEStor.
Zenn uses the relationship with EEStor, and the fact that it’s a private company to disavow knowledge and to avoid disclosing pertinent information–have they ever seen a prototype, but provides a steady stream of red herring details, and mysterious leaks appear from time to time to keep the hype going.
This conference call is just the latest example. Information is disclosed to a select group of investors, presumably by the so-called private company EEStor, but is obviously important to Zenn’s stock price, so the conference call should have either not been held, or should have been made available to all investors at the same time.