Sifferkoll has been active on LENR Forum, arguing for the right to insult. Not surprising. His blog has skated around the edge of libel, which is criminal in Sweden, and one might think that libeling billion-dollar corporations would generate some caution, but … No.
Did Woodford Recently Buy Industrial Heat Shares at a 87% discount?
Posted on 2017/07/23
This was based on two Ahlfors images from LENR Forum. Sifferkoll commonly doesn’t link to ready verification. Neither does Ahlfors, and commonly Ahlfors images are, ah, unclear in significance. In this case, Sifferkoll has a history of misinterpreting data from Industrial Heat.
The two images are:
Woodord Funds Patient Capital Trust portfolio holdings as of May 21, 2017. This shows:
36 Industrial Heat (unquoted) Industrials 0.87%
52 Industrial Heat A2 Pref (unquoted) Industrials 0.50%
73 Industrial Heat A3 (unquoted) Industrials 0.04%
A more recent report as of June 30, 2017 shows the same.
What does this mean? The number on the left is the rank of the holdings in all holdings of the fund (there are 77 as of June 39). The percentage is the ratio of the specific holding to the entire fund. The figure I found for total fund value as of June 30 was £829.5 million. (I don’t have the May 21 value) In USD, that would be about 1.30 USD/GBP as of June 30. So the total fund value is 1.078.35 billion. That gives rough values for the various holdings:
no class given: $9.38 million
A2 Pref $5.39 million
A3 $0.31 million
IHHI (the actual company involved) filings are found here.
Sifferkoll shows the other Ahlfors image, showing the first page of the 6 July 2017 filing of an IHHI share allotment. This was a sale of 377,391 Series A shares (preferred) for $2,153,652.57, or $5.70669 per share.
Sifferkoll calculates,
So according to the filing above stock is now valued at $5.7 compared to ~$45 when the original shares were bought by Woodford, Looking at the Woodford funds total holdings it seems as if they now value the complete (increased by about 50%) IH position to roughly $25M (all their funds). And this was before the settlement…
I get about $15 million. What is the value of the IHHI investment? There is a court document that goes into that, but I’m not going into it today. How does one value a company like IHHI? One standard would be the value of assets, but some assets are rather intangible, like licenses. Clearly, however, the IPH licenses to Rossi technology were not being valued for beans. $15 million might be cash on hand. Or might be partly speculative.
Sifferkoll is assuming that the shares were issued to Woodford. That’s not clear, though it seems plausible. This could have been a new investment to cover IH legal expenses or other operating expenses. As to the alleged “$45” value, this was never understood by Sifferkoll, and was misrepresented by Rossi in the trial. That was what Woodford paid in $2015 for preferred shares, which is similar to a loan, it does not establish the value of ordinary shares at all. It provides working capital that is to be paid off first, after ordinary debts but before any distribution to ordinary shares.
I don’t know when they did it, but Woodford is not carrying the original $50 million in preferred shares at cost basis, obviously. It would be misleading for them to do so. Why this value of $5.71 was chosen, I have no idea.
Rossi, in the lawsuit, valued IHHI at about $45.05 per share, using the preferred share value, but multiplying it by the total number of all shares, turning about $50 million into $1 billion. Chaiken said in his opening statement to the jury in Rossi v. Darden:
May 2015, payday. Defendants successfully sell 4 percent of their company in exchange for 50 million dollars. That’s a 1 billion dollar valuation. They kept 96 percent, they gave out 4 percent of their shares for 50 million dollars. Company called Woodford gave them that money. Oh, they’re going to claim that money didn’t go into their pockets. That, instead, it was used to invest in other LENR technologies. Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence will
show, that they still have ownership of those technologies. They still have the right to get the benefit of those technologies. My client has no right to those technologies and will receive no benefit from those technologies.
(And definitely, this pissed Rossi off! How dare they invest in other technologies?)
But they had not sold “4%” of their company. Preferred stock can’t be compared with ordinary stock like that. The preferred stock had voting rights, per share, equivalent to the penny shares that Darden and others owned, so control remained with them. Preferred stock is far more like a relatively temporary loan that doesn’t have to be paid back unless the company liquidates, after payment of other debts, where it gets paid before ordinary stock. (I have not studied the details about dividends, but that is all moot for a company that is not expected to turn a profit for a long time, if ever.)
This new stock was issued at a different cost. That’s all. It is unclear to me what difference it makes. This isn’t an arms-length sale. There is no market for the stock. As I see it, this was Woodford tossing $2 million to IHHI, perhaps preparing them for lengthy litigation costs. That didn’t happen.
Like most of what Sifferkoll writes, this was fluff, nothing.
Surprise! (not)
Sifferkoll has been again banned on LENR Forum. His post record shows massive argument with a moderator. As pointed out by can:
Most discussion boards have an “argue in public with a moderator on moderation matters and you’ll get suspended/banned”-kind of policy for a reason, so I’m sort of surprised that this meta-discussion is still going on.
“A reason” is that when participation starts wasting the time of a volunteer who is not paid to put up with tons of crap, said volunteer may decide to stop it.
Forum staff consult on bans, a policy that may have begun with mine. This was one of two improvements that I “brought” to LENR Forum. The other was that they stopped deleting “off-topic” posts, but started moving them to new threads, including the Playground and Clearance items. The only apparent cause for my own ban was declaring a personal boycott of the Forum until that was addressed. I was promptly banned without explanation, anonymously. Then, ultimately, they addressed it. My other sin was discussing the whole affair here.
I never approached the level of disruption that Sifferkoll long represented. In fact, it appears that LF was biased, not against Rossi, but for him, though it had ideals of open discussion. As Alain Coetmeur “apostasized,” and Eric Walker came on board as a moderator, that shifted toward what I’d say is the middle.
I learned about the ban on Sifferkoll’s blog (which I don’t link to as a matter of policy, but it can easily be found. Not too many “Sifferkoll”s out there.) His new headline:
WARNING! Eric Walker of LENR-FORUM is Tracking IP numbers of Forum Members!
Sifferkoll just “discovered” that amazing news! Blog administrators have privileged tools! Who knew?
If I want to see it, I can see not only the IP address of anyone posting on this blog, I can see them even for who is reading anything. This is standard for web sites, all access is logged. Anyone with host domain access can see the logs for all page access.
There is a story in the news yesterday about a subpoena for these logs, being fought in the courts as overbroad and dangerous. But nobody questions the right of a site owner to have log access, and then site owners determine what users have the privilege of seeing the data. Routinely, on Media Wiki sites, if a non-logged-in user edits, the IP becomes public. (A common request was for these edits to be “revision-deleted,” so the public could not see them, but any admin still could, unless it is “oversighted,” a high-level privilege).
Seeing the IP address is routine for all blog comments; WP SpamShield also sends me the User Agent string, which provides detailed information about the user’s computer system, operating system, revision levels, software of the browser, and how many natural teeth the user has. Okay, not the latter, and it’s obvious why. That information is necessary for smooth operation of the internet. IP address especially, data transfer on the internet is always by handshake, verifying the actual sender. (But the actual sender could use a proxy, and there are open proxies that anyone can use, and then lists of these, which are used by WP SpamShield to identify spam and automatically block it, and the whole antispam industry monitors the internet extensively to identify open proxies ASAP. It’s a war, actually.
This is the information that WikiMedia Foundation Checkusers access to identify socking. Ordinary WMF admins don’t have that information, they must consult a Checkuser, who is obligated by privacy policy to not disclose the information, but only the results of analysis. I handled many cases (as a WMF user and administrator) and have seen just how ragged that can get, but WordPress gives this information to any high-level administrator.
Sifferkoll has this information, and, as I recall, he has used it and has disclosed it. Most web sites have a privacy policy that requires not disclosing the information without necessity. Identifying disruptive users, attempting to evade a ban, is commonly considered necessity.
Sifferkoll has used other accounts on LENR Forum, including using at least one to evade a ban. He has previously all-but-admitted this, complaining about his alternate account being banned. Here, he does the same:
After lying — apparently — about why he was banned, Sifferkoll has:
However this made me track my handle back and then I found something interesting…
I’ve missed this comment before but a while ago when Eric was on the hunt for Rossi defenders he admitted that he is tracking the IP from where I login:
Absolute proof is hard to come by since we don’t require people to establish their identity when signing up at the present time. But (1) you’re logged in from the same ISP as sifferkoll ,
I covered this on The drama continues
See this post by slashdevnull, a Sifferkoll sock, and then followup.
slashdevslashnull : we think you’re sifferkoll . If true, then you have attempted to escape the temporary account suspension by creating a new account, after which you have taken baby steps towards resuming your previous obnoxious behavior. This is not something to be encouraged.
Shall I mention the other account that we have long suspected of being a sock puppet of yours?
That is a pretty serious accusation Eric. Please elaborate. And can you also please present proof of yourself not simply being a “polite troll” of the worst kind?
So … an accusation of socking is a “serious accusation.” Sifferkoll is here acknowledging that socking is widely considered reprehensible. Otherwise it wouldn’t be “serious.” If false, this could be defamation.
Sifferkoll is an Aspie and often such have inflated ideas of their own intelligence and the scope of it. He’s not “in recovery,” he’s unrestrained. I would suggest to every Aspie getting a coach, someone trusted to tell you when you have gone off the rails. It’s mostly a matter of learning when to shut up and to re-examine the basis of one’s world view. It can be a killer.
Absolute proof is hard to come by since we don’t require people to establish their identity when signing up at the present time. But (1) you’re logged in from the same ISP as sifferkoll , (2) your mannerisms are indistinguishable from those of sifferkoll , and (3) your account was created shortly after sifferkoll was placed under suspension.
Just to give a heads-up to anyone else reading this thread so that it does not come as a surprise, the likelihood is very high that this account will be perma-banned.
Sifferkoll then, as he normally does, jumps to conclusions. This post is an indication that Eric has access to IP information, but is not strong evidence, because … Rends, another LF moderator — and generally pro-Rossi, about three days later — wrote:
@all I would like to explicitly clarify that Eric Walker does not act alone and omnipotent, but, even if he does not have to, always coordinates his administrative interventions with the administrators and moderators of this forum, therefore I would welcome it very much if these untenable insinuations stops!
LF, after I was banned, began to develop some level of collective competence, and consultation before banning would be an aspect of that. I do not know if Eric has access to IP information, directly, but what he would could simply reflect a communication he had with someone who does. I am almost certain that Barty has root access to the server, which would give him complete information even outside the software. I do not know if other “administrators” have it, but if they do, then AlainCo would have it. Again, I don’t know if ordinary moderators or “super moderators” have it, but … it really doesn’t matter. Someone has it, and someone can be asked.
I certainly have that kind of information here, and surely Sifferkoll would be aware of that. He commented here.
From the standard WordPress administrative interface, looking at his comment in the Comment review screen, I can see his IP and I can click on it and immediately see all comments from that IP. So I could immediately see any comments under that IP, regardless of user name.
Readily available user logs only go back so far, these are routinely dumped after a time. For that reason, I think, WMF checkuser only goes back so far; however, individual checkusers do keep personal records of what they have checked, and share this with other checkusers, there is a special private wiki for that. They do, in fact, violate privacy policy, on occasion. However, if legal push came to legal shove, they would doubtless claim necessity.
For policy reasons, I’m not going to reveal all that I know, and we do routinely respect privacy. I will say two things, then:
- Sifferkoll’s access IP shows him using a particular Swedish service provider. This information is permanently stored.
- His domain host for sifferkoll.se is the same provider.
On WMF wikis, the evidence described by Eric would be routinely adequate, not controversial, to justify a permanent ban, and if this was over more than one wiki, it could easily become a global account lock, which would then be enforced by stewards regardless of the original situation. Checkusers can see — and sometimes act on — a user merely looking at one of the wikis, if it creates an automatic log-in.
As pointed out above, Sifferkoll is aware of how serious an offense this is. (or he was trolling, merely pretending to be falsely accused and saying that bit about “serious” would, he might think, increase credibility.) He’s been treated very gingerly even though he has offended users and the staff repeatedly.
slashdevslashnull was permanently banned. anotherTroll was likewise banned. (He had previously been suspended.)
My own suggestion would that since Sifferkoll was complaining extensively about Eric, (on-forum and off), it would have been better for Eric to recuse and ask another moderator to look at the situation. On Wikiversity, I developed procedures to use if a user was being disruptive and I was the only administrator active. Basically, one may block to protect the wiki and immediately create a review process due to otherwise being subject to a recusal requirement. But Wikiversity is a public wiki, and is, in theory, run by the community. LENR Forum is a private web site, not community-run, but by a small group of moderators, chosen by a murky process, but likely the only person who can assign and remove privileges is the Founder, though in practice, Barty could certainly do it and maybe AlainCo.
Sifferkoll is pissing in the wind. LENR Forum may be the least of it. Sifferkoll is a conspiracy theorist, but like many such, there is a way in which he obviously doesn’t believe his own theories. If the conspiracy was as wide as he claims, involving companies as powerful as he claims, and if these people are unscrupulous, he’d be dead not long after they felt that he was any kind of threat at all. Sometimes people have no idea about how much money $1 billion is.
As it is, he is libelling billion-dollar corporations, which is a crime in Sweden, I understand. Eric Walker and the LF staff is the least of it, they are not likely to act internationally. (However, I suppose Eric might be offered the opportunity to lend his name to a complaint. My guess is that he would decline. Eric is actually quite straight-arrow and would want to avoid the appearance of any entanglement with, say, Cherokee Investment Partners or Industrial Heat.
If he were telling the truth, well, we might sympathize with him as a possible martyr. But he’s not. He lies and misleads and distorts.
Sifferkoll used a Swedish phrase in his last post, När man talar om trollen, equivalent to the English “speak of the devil.”
I used that for a post title here, a couple of weeks ago. Speak of the devil.
The occasion for that was a LENR Forum post the mentioned me. That also happened in the Sifferkoll mess:
Eric Walker wrote: (in response to Mary Yugo pointing out that Roger (allegedly) was impersonating “Mary Yugo” on Peter Gluck’s blog):
maryyugo there’s not a whole lot we can do in this case. I suggest you write Peter Gluck privately and let him know, and/or add a note to the blog to clarify the matter for others. I recall something like this happening to Abd Mats Lewan as well.
Actually, on Peter’s blog, it did happen to me. I was impersonated, and very likely by the same person pretending to be Mary Yugo; this was some time ago when Peter was still active. It is really easy to do this on blogs that allow direct and immediate comments. In that earlier incident, Mary may have added a note, but it was unclear, and Peter had no clue how to handle it. How could he tell what was genuine and what was fake?
Easily, actually, plus he could directly email people. He could ask others for help, I’d certainly have assisted him. But by that time he did not trust me in the least.
As to Mats Lewan, this comment was how I learned that a post here wasn’t from Mats. You can see how it was handled.
One of the standard reasons for revealing IP information would be where internet access was used for identity theft.
Abd did suggest/imply PG was [redacted as unnecessary – Abd] in this place, but I don’t think Roger ever personated him, on PG’s blog or in here.
Alan Smith: color him socially clueless. And wrong. I am not going to repeat or justify what I wrote then, because at this time there is no necessity, and it would be like hitting a man when he’s down. Peter was a long-term friend and the whole affair was unfortunate, and I hope he recovers fully.
But it is a near certainty that the same person who impersonated Mary Yugo on Peter’s blog also impersonated me. The themes were familiar, matching Roger Barker behavior on LENR Forum. Grossly offensive posts, well beyond the pale. No redeeming value. Not banned on LF, and then there is The Real Roger Barker
This account apparently exists to harass Mary Yugo (and acknowledges trolling).
LENR Forum has not yet clearly decided if it’s a rowdy bar [like moletrap] or a serious forum. Rowdy bars may like to keep disruptive trolls around for the entertainment. It may toss them out if they go too far, which would probably involve broken furniture or ambulances. Or, more to the point, annoying the bartender.
Serious fora will ban them on sight; if they do this quickly, little damage is done. Users can generally reform behavior and come back if they want. (It’s too much work to maintain full vigilance against socking, but not when a sock puppet waves a flag “Look at Me!” A new account engaging in disruptive behavior can be banned quickly, and that is how Wikipedia practice settled, they have a standard process of so many warnings, but it’s swift. (And then some admins bypass the warnings, and I’ve not seen any sanctioned for it.)
If “The Real Roger Barker” truly wants to use his real name and distance himself from the Other Roger Barkers, he could easily do so.
Meanwhile, gross offense on LENR Forum appears to be long-tolerated, then sometimes banned. Reading Eric’s explanations of policy, my sense is that there is no policy, there is only ad hoc handling of each situation, which is guaranteed to be inefficient and erratic and unreliable.
But there is no conspiracy, it’s only amateur behavior.
One more mention of the devil:
… In terms of balance, Abd is banished to a happier place, …
So now I’m the token banned Rossi critic. However, my ban had nothing to do with that, at least not outwardly, so I’m not sure this is meaningful. It would be more correct that I criticized moderator practice, specifically Smith’s easy delete-trigger-finger. I wrote that I would be boycotting the Forum until these unexpected and erratic and unnecessary deletions were addressed (and one of the solutions I had previously suggested is what they now do). The response was, in effect, “You can’t boycott us, because you are banned.” Like a certain President dealing with industrialists resigning from his business councils by disbanding the councils: you can’t resign, you don’t have a position any more.
But Alan is right in that I was far happier devoting more time to the blog (which had already been created before the Can’t Quit Ban). Far, far, far happier, than slogging through the muck on LENR Forum. I can look at it if I want and ignore it if I want. I can actually create content here; when I attempted to do that on LENR Forum, it was damaged by … Alan Smith.
But the format of LENR Forum is not conducive to content creation. It’s a discussion group and easily distracted.
Troll-washing
The Real Roger Barker now suspended on LENR Forum.
Roger Barker is not.
(If someone has been impersonated, it is normally easy to establish a real identity. Doing what TRRB was most likely trolling, and probably lying. Again, easy to establish truth, if it is truth. TRRB made some claims and was told that if he did not provide evidence, he’d be suspended. His response:
Alan Smith Eric Walker Go on Eric. Just ban me and be done with it. You guys claim to run a free and fair forum but it is only full of hate and vitriol.
“Roger” simply made the decision really easy. The most noticeable offense: arguing with moderators, extensively, on moderation issues, creating post after post to waste moderator time. He hasn’t been banned, yet, only suspended. This is a weak response, but the only real harm done is a bit more time to be wasted in the future, likely. Mary Yugo can handle the abuse (but the back-and-forth is not tolerable, my opinion, and Mary would properly be warned. On the other hand, what Mary got done on Peter’s blog is commendable.
[it is offensive to repeat offensive comment when there is no necessity, and Mary does that here. I’d warn.]
Georgina, at my urging, has deleted all the offending posts and has placed Peter Gluck’s blog on complete moderation.
Mary did not use the quote facility, which would have provided source. Because Mary attributed this to “Roger Barker,” not the longer, currently active user name, I thought maybe this was an old quote. No. It was from The Real Roger Barker, and betrays that he was almost certainly lying.
(The post from Mary Yugo that TRRB was replying to was also inappropriate. We care about Peter Gluck, so the general topic was acceptable, but it was unnecessary to quote all that, and, as well, to vituperatively attack Roger Barker — even if he deserved it.)
Update
Alan Smith confirmed that LENR Forum moderators don’t have IP information, but that an administrator might supply information when appropriate.
Actually moderators do not have access to members metadata as siffer suggests. Admin will sometimes inform mods (if a reasonable request is made by a mod) if a member appears to be using more than 1 log-in ID. But the data itself is not known to us.
Alan was not clear on who actually has access, it is “admin,” and there are two adiministrators (Barty and AlainCo) plus the Founder (and normally founders/owners have full access to everything). But close enough.
Alan Smith : Eric said different things. Obviously he has different power(s)…
Actually, Eric did not say something “different.” I quoted him above. Here it is again:
Absolute proof is hard to come by since we don’t require people to establish their identity when signing up at the present time. But (1) you’re logged in from the same ISP as sifferkoll , (2) your mannerisms are indistinguishable from those of sifferkoll , and (3) your account was created shortly after sifferkoll was placed under suspension.
and then I wrote above:
Sifferkoll then, as he normally does, jumps to conclusions. This post is an indication that Eric has access to IP information, but is not strong evidence, because … Rends, another LF moderator — and generally pro-Rossi, about three days later — wrote:
@all I would like to explicitly clarify that Eric Walker does not act alone and omnipotent, but, even if he does not have to, always coordinates his administrative interventions with the administrators and moderators of this forum, therefore I would welcome it very much if these untenable insinuations stops!
So Wyttenbach obviously also jumps to conclusions, and when presented with contrary evidence (Alan’s statement) holds to his original conclusions. Not surprising for him.
Troll-washing. “Gonna wash that troll right outa my hair.” The Real Roger Barker was suspended for two weeks on LENR Forum, though there was ample evidence for a ban.
Surprise … Not. Updated with news of Sifferkoll’s LENR Forum ban and his reaction, wherein he again admits he was socking on LENR Forum, even though he had admitted before that this was a serious offense (because charges of socking were “serious”).