At Midnight Hour – Vois Loses Their Voice
More often then not, companies like talking with bloggers because we give free publicity, but if you give enough interviews, then sooner or later you’re bound to step on a land mine.
After having spent a great deal of time researching Vois, I had a lot of questions with no answers, so I reached out to Herbert Tabin asking for an interview. Unfortunately, Mr. Tabin wasn’t interested, but Vois Co-founder Craig Agranoff was happy to chat in public.
To be fair to Mr. Agranoff, he came into the podcast expecting a cupcake interview on web 2.0 topics. Unfortunately, businesses don’t tend to like talking with critics, so I asked them to come on the air and then ambushed him with questions that I knew would be difficult to answer. Once Mr. Agranoff realized that I knew a little bit too much about their arrangements he cut the conversation short. While I can understand his reluctance to finish the conversation, I do believe that their are still many questions that haven’t been answered. As a public company, Vois should be more transparent. If Mr. Agranoff, Tabin or Schultheis want to come back on the show and tell their side of the story, I’d still love to have you on to finish the podcast.
A couple of things that might help in better understanding the questions and answers. When it comes to the market cap, Agranoff was correct. It closed today just shy of $13 million. I had assumed that the split had already taken place because there were two days where you would not have been entitled to the split if you would have purchased shares.
The other piece of information that might help is a little bit of background on Joel San Antonio. Before Vois went public, the shell that they used was named Medstrong International Corp. Mr. San Antonio was a Director for Medstrong and would have played a crucial role in negotiating the merger.
He is also the co-founder of Jicka.com, a Craigslist competitor that Agranoff, Schultheis and Tabin are also involved in. Jicka is a separate entity and isn’t publicly traded, but one of the trends that I noticed with some of Tabin and Schultheis’ former companies is that they liked to buy a lot of businesses and later respin them onto the public. Since San Antonio would have had to give up equity when he gave up Medstrong, this sort of arrangement looks suspicious.
Here is a bit more on San Antonio’s background,
San Antonio was the CEO of Warrantech, a rebate firm that was sued by AIG for their role in a $500 million toxic bet. According to USAToday,
“AIG paid its partners — the third-party administrators such as MBA and Warrantech, as well as credit unions and car dealers who sold the warranties and serviced the vehicles — based on how many contracts they processed rather than how the warranties performed. As a result, AIG suspected, some dealers packaged warranties with auto “lemons,” so customers could rehabilitate the cars at its expense.”
AIG wasn’t the only one upset, certain underwriters at Lloyds of London went so far as to sue Warrantech, alleging that they had been paying out phantom warranties without documentation.
“Underwriters asserts causes of action against Warrantech for fraud and negligent misrepresentation, alleging that they are subrogated to all rights Houston General may have to seek damages from defendants concerning claims wrongfully submitted and paid under the insurance policies. Underwriters also seeks to recover for spoilation, alleging that Warrantech destroyed certain evidence during the course of the arbitration proceeding.”
In 2004, the company was forced to restate earnings after an investigation by the SEC
SearchHelp Inc. is another dodgy publicly traded company that San Antonio has served as a Director for. Jeffrey Supinsky, the “head of business and development” is a former trader who was barred by the NASD.
I could go on and on, but don’t want to lose focus on Vois. For now, I’ll just have to be content with keeping an eye on this Craigslist killer.
Posted on July 9th, 2009 by Davis
Filed under: Spam, Technology, VOD, Web 2.0