Nazerali v. Deep Capture

A Canadian stock promotor, Altaf Nazerali, has filed a notice of claim against the website Deepcapture.com and its operators, contending that the site has falsely characterized him as a con artist.

You can access the notice of claim on Scribd: here.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia has issued a court order shutting the site down, which is why you get a blank screen if you try to go here: www.deepcapture.com

Stockwatch quotes the complaint quoting the website saying that Nazerali is affiliated with "an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali's mobster friend Egor Chernov)" and that he has "working relationships with ... members of Al Qaeda's Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan's ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network."

I first learned of this from Gary Weiss' blog. Weiss is especially interested in the (intimate) relationship between Deep Capture and Overstock,com, nowadays also known as O.co, and Overstock boss Patrick Byrne.

Regular readers of Pragmatism Refreshed might recall that to Byrne the phrase "the Milken network" in the above quotation has a special resonance. Ex-con Michael Milken, is one-half of the collective Sith Lord (the other half is Steven Cohen). This Sith Lord -- a term of course taken from the Star Wars movies -- is at the center of a vast worldwide web of corruption -- perhaps the web of corruption, since there hardly seems to be anything wrong with the world in recent decades that doesn't get introduced into Deep Capture's theories.

Anyway, Deep Capture has apparently assigned Nazerali a key role in this same awesome/awful network linking (as Weiss puts it) "every crime since Jack the Ripper."

Nazerali has named as defendants not only Deep Capture LLC and Byrne, but High Plains Investments LLC, GoDaddy Inc., (the site's registrar), NoZone Inc. (its host), Google Inc., Google's Canadian subsidiary, and Illinois resident Mark Mitchell.

Let's pause on Mitchell, described in the court filing as the principal author of the defamatory articles.  This is the first time I've mentioned him on Pragmatism Refreshed. He was once the assistant managing editor of CJR Daily, a web outlet of the Columbia Journalism Review.  During his tenure, the CJR was often accused of ... well ... just missing the point when it touched upon finance journalism. Missing various points.  Among those making that case was Joseph Weisenthal of The Stalwart.

Under his watch, too, Gal Beckerman penned an incomprehensible complaint about a perfectly routine WSJ story about nervousness among some Berkshire Hathaway stockholders, and Mitchell came riding to the defense of that complaint, without in the process making it any more comprehensible.

By the end of Mitchell's time there the CJR Daily had essentially given up on tracking finance journalism. Yet he had the name and reputation that came from his time there and he was, excuse the expression, a big capture for Deep Capture, when he started writing for them, apparently some time in 2008.

I'm just trying to keep all the players straight here.

Meanwhile, a commenter on Weiss' blog suggests that "Mr. Nazerali took umbrage with journalists in the past (NY Post and some Canadian paper). 2 reporters named Christopher Byron and Lee Webb did a story on a firm Mr. Nazerali was associated with over 10 years ago," and Deep Capture has just recycled this.

It will be fascinating watching how this plays out in the courts of the Great White North.