Welcome to Asensio.CoN
The
website address is asensio.com. Manuel Asensio's photo greets you on
the home page. The site recently sent emails to subscribers for the sole purpose
of advising them that Asensio had schmoozed with hedge
fund people at a swish Connecticut yacht club and submitted unsolicited comments to a Senate committee.
Yet for two years now, we've been asked to believe that Manuel
Asensio no longer has anything to do with asensio.com. Not just asked.
Required. To use asensio.com and/or receive emails
from the site, you must accept a formal Agreement. Among the
terms:
NO CORPORATE EXISTENCE AND NO AFFILIATION WITH ANY CORPORATE ENTITY CALLED "ASENSIO & COMPANY, INC." OR WITH MANUEL P. ASENSIO. asensio.com is not formed, is not owned or operated by or affiliated with, any corporate entity, including any corporate entity that may exist that is incorporated under the name Asensio & Company, Inc. or Manuel P. Asensio.
Got that? Asensio.com has nothing to do with Manuel Asensio or any corporate entity using the name Asensio & Company.
Does It Seem Odd to You...
Does it seem strange that this
"non-corporate" entity, which also claims to have no assets, has a website so slick
that a
professional web designer must be maintaining it?
Does it seem strange that the "new owners," supposedly took over in October
2003, but have never identified themselves? Yet they talk about Asensio
all the time?
Does it seem odd that Asensio supposedly left
asensio.com in October 2003, yet the change in ownership was
not announced until April 2004?
It does to us.
Does it seem odd to have to sign a bizarre multi-part Agreement to obtain
opinions about stocks?
Have you ever signed a contract in which you agreed that the other party has no
assets, yet actively engages in financial transactions?
Users agree that asensio.com has no assets and conducts no business, and does not seek to and has not solicited any business, in the United States of America.
You are instructed to assume that asensio.com, Asensio & Company, Inc. and its related party or parties, if any, actively engage in transactions prior to, at the time and after the release of a report, or at any other time, and that these transactions are solely and exclusively in its interest and counter to your own, and opposite to asensio.com and Asensio & Company, Inc.'s published opinions.
For
that matter, does it seem odd to you that while having no assets, asensio.com
is able to engage a company that services businesses with large
email lists to handle its subscriber list?
The firm is called Constant Contact.
It's the company that gave away Asensio's secret.
Meet Free and Fair Capital
Markets News, INC.
It will come as news to Constant
Contact that asensio.com has no corporate existence. At the bottom
of every email that Constant Contact distributes for asensio.com is this line:
This email was sent to [email address] by Free and Fair Capital Markets News, Inc.
Oops! So much for asensio.com's
denial of a
corporate existence. Now for the big question. Who owns FFCMN and
why are they lying about it?
FFCMN is a New York
corporation, set up
in 2004. The only contact information provided is as follows:
c/o Feiler, Leach & McCarron, L.P.
Penthouse Suite, 901 Ponce De Leon Blvd
Coral Gables FL 33134
That's not Manuel Asensio, you say? Correct. It's the address of the law firm of Michael Feiler.
Who is Michael Feiler? He's a Miami attorney who has represented Asensio on various matters in the Florida courts. Which makes rather obvious who almost certainly owns Free and Fair Capital Markets News.
More Smoking Guns
The devil's advocate
would say that Asensio
sold or gifted his interest in asensio.com and Asensio & Company on the
condition that the new owners use his Florida attorney. Improbable
as that is, it would be in the realm of the possible were Asensio's story not
so full of other
holes.
A letter posted to his website
on April 27, 2004 announced that new owners had taken over Asensio & Company and asensio.com effective October 31, 2003.
These new owners claimed full independence from Asensio, and he has since asserted that his relationship with both entities is a
former one.
Yet, during the six months between his supposed departure and the announcement
of it, Asensio clearly had been conducting business as
usual at Asensio & Company and asensio.com. A few examples:
* On December 17, 2003—six weeks after reportedly ending involvement with Asensio & Company—Asensio submitted comments to the SEC. He identified himself as "Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Asensio & Company."
* Although he supposedly had turned over asensio.com to new owners, he gave his contact address as reports@asensio.com.
* On April 12, 2004—more than five months after he supposedly turned both businesses over to new owners—the New York Times published an article about nanotechnology. It was prompted by a letter he had written a few days earlier to Eliot Spitzer. He was described as "chief executive" of "Asensio & Company."
* He was likewise identified as the head of Asensio & Company and/or associated with the asensio.com website in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on March 23, 2004 and in an article on the Dow Jones newswire on March 26, 2004. This was more than four months after he was supposedly gone from both.
What's more, similar
evidence continued to accumulate after Asensio's supposed exit on April
27, 2004. We'll present some of that in Part Two, along with our take on why
he's trying to conceal his ownership of both enterprises.
Where are the Regulators?
For more than two years, Asensio has had many people convinced that he is no longer the party behind asensio.com and Asensio & Company. He has forced investors to sign away their rights to sue him in order to obtain information that he (and his undisclosed hedge fund clients) are circulating about stocks they own.* He's continued to violate countless provisions of the NASD research analyst rules that apply to him by virtue of his ownership of Integral Securities. Those rules were designed to bring fairness and honesty to the securities market. We don't know anyone less compliant with them than Asensio.
All of which begs one question. Where are the regulators? Why has this fraud gone undetected by NASD for more than two years? After all, NASD has taken action—albeit the wrist-slapping variety—against Asensio for misleading investors via his website not once, but twice. You'd think someone at NASD would be keeping an eye on asensio.com—perhaps by subscribing to his mailing list at a non-NASD email address.
What will they do now that the
facts are out? Our best guess is absolutely nothing. (If past is
prologue, no one should be surprised if Asensio's guardian angels at
NASD District
10 help him set up an asset protection trust in the Cayman Islands to hide his
ownership of these two entities.)
The fact that investors had to get the word out about this deception via their own
website, and the reality that regulators will probably turn a blind eye to it, is a
sad commentary on the state of securities regulation today. In the world
of securities, deceiving investors not only pays, but pays rather handsomely.
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* Whether the Agreement is actually enforceable is a separate issue. Since
we're not lawyers, we won't venture into that territory.
Page Created 07/07/06