Details of Dick Weir/EEStor interview leak emerge
Saturday, August 8th, 2009I 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.
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.
