Saturday, September 11, 2010

Inside an Issuer Retaliation Scheme

Roddy Boyd's Financial Investigator blog today has a riveting inside account of the dirty-tricks campaign against hedgie David Einhorn from an interesting perspective -- from a journalist courted by a p.r. guy for Einhorn's nemesis, Allied Capital.

Roddy was working for Fortune when he was approached by Sitrick & Co. Seems that Einhorn's fund had hit some rough spots.
...once the hoped-for story touched upon Einhorn’s losses, [Sitrick flack Jeffrey] Lloyd had ready any number of other facts and figures designed to illustrate rather convincingly a very important premise to Lloyd’s client: that David Einhorn was a really, really over-rated fellow. In fact, if I had gone farther and implied that Einhorn was a pretty bad guy, well, Jeff and his clients would have been fine with that too.

All Sitrick’s Lloyd needed was a reporter to bite.
So he called a reporter at Fortune who he thought would be a lapdog, and was unpleasantly surprised to find himself referred to Roddy.

The rest of this fascinating account can be found here.

© 2010 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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