Riding The MRI Construction Farcical - Bait and Switch Part 3

Hi Folks,

Hopefully (although unlikely) this will be the final episode in the Bait and Switch series. We say unlikely on the account that there appears to be no limit as to what gets said or done by the "Leading Overseas Property Company"

We have our Legal Beagle at the ready as you can see to carefully look at what we write and make sure we are being good.

Last week CaboVerde24 had a letter issued to its hosts by MRI's lawyers, demanding that they take down/remove content about them, not unusal one might think, being as almost everyone on the planet has been warned or threatened at some point for even mentioning their name.

It would appear the forum owner has had no choice but to move the content to a secure section of his site, and does express concern at free speech and the like.

One might presume that "that's the end of that" but no, just 3 days later, a new thread has come about regarding an "Urgent MRI Meeting" to save you racking your brains as to what the devil that could be all about, it is an invitiation to an "Absolutely must attend Director level meeting"

Hmm Director level eh? Could that be that all the other staff now work for Solutions Overseas, or DCC International Property, those companies that aren't related, in any way, shape or form, other than by address, offices, staff, directors and managers. Not to mention the pay per click campaign? (For those that aren't aware, when running a PPC campaign, you are not allowed to pay for trademark keywords that you do not own. For example, If we were to go and purchase the word "Microsoft" for a campaign, Mr Gates would be well within his rights to sue us to the grave. Type in certain MRI phrases and see what comes up on the sponsored ads, chances are though it will be disabled after a couple of days)

The basic premise seems to be, "Threaten everyone you can, and then start the switch program all over again" The same story seems to be the case over on the Tierra Del Sol Owners Forum who kindly posted some links to their plights, the main ones being,

Meeting with MRI thread, and,

MRI are threatening legal action against TDSO

MRI also amusingly threatened the owner of the domain investmentpropertyrumours.com who submitted the correspondance to us through the comments section which can be seen in the We Get Heat article in which we suggested that Mr Bulow and/or the MRI lawyers contact us. So far, not a peep out of them.

The latest correspondance we have had submitted from domain owner Mr Stevenson we can't directly publish, but our legal beagle says we can say that it wasn't very nice, but nevertheless amusing on the account of barking up the wrong tree, and that the letter repeatedly stated that the they (the lawyers) had been instructed that everything on the blog was untrue.

The letter itself reads as though it has personally been shouted at a secretary whilst her only copy of "Hello Magazine" is dangled over the shredder.

Mr Bulow cannot claim that he cannot contact us, he in fact runs a rather interesting blogspot blog himself, rather offensively titled "Letters From The Septic Land"

The first post on it back in march 2008 also has a very odd twist to it, the url for it is http://cjbulow.blogspot.com/2008/03/land-of-merkins-and-septics.html

On the post itself he suggests we use google to look up the title if one is not English. To save you the bother, a "Septic" is cockney rhyming slang for Yank, or American. (Septic tank = Yank)

Very nice Mr Bulow! Rather you than me writing things like that whilst living and working in the US.

As for the rarely used word "Merkin" in the url, here is a definition according to Answers.com

Noun. A pubic wig for women. [Alteration of obsolete malkin, lower-class woman, mop, from Middle English, from Malkin, diminutive of the personal name Matilda.]

Would you buy an investment from a man who talks about things like this?

The thing is though, as this new round of "Top Secret" meetings goes on, one has to question the validity of many of the "investment properties" that were offerred in the first place.

A certain Malcolm J Wright is/was on the books for American Leisure. Now that Tierra del Sol has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, a few things need to be asked.

Mr Wright had rather a lot of fingers in a very large number of pies, a full list of which can be seen here. Nothing really untoward about that one could say, (Apart from the Allen Stanford $8 Billion fraud case!) however.

A little more googling later and we come accross an excerpt of an SEC filing. (Securities and Exchange Commission) which is basically discovery litigation regarding securities fraud, violation of Florida Securities and Investor Protection Act, breach of their employment contracts, and claims for fraudulent inducement, against Malcolm J Wright.

Now bearing in mind that the excerpt is from 2007, and it really wasn't the hardest article in the world to find, one has to ask why anyone would do business with someone under that kind of investigation? Granted MRI were not the only people to be promoting TDS, a now defunct Platinum Properties was also involved.

Given this track record though, it does beg the question of how much due diligence was actually done in the first place? The Stanford Group of companies seems to be turning into an ever expanding nightmare which will run for years, but at least the main crux of that has been frozen and closed down to prevent more cons and scams.

Was the "Due Diligence" in the form of large commissions? We don't know. What we do know though is that commissions received will have to be paid back under the chapter 11 proceedings. That should be an interesting one!

As for libel and more threats? There is a fantastic article written by Diarmaid Condon published on OverseasCafe.com which highlights exactly what goes on in this very corrupt industry.

We have invited MRI Construction (Or whatever they are called this week) to contact us, and we invite them again. Tell us exactly which bits you perceive as libel and why, and we and our legal beagle will go through each and every one.

We have not broken any laws in the way we write or report. Google quite clearly states its position on the use of its blog platform in the following quote from its help section,

"Please note that Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we don't make any claims about the content of these pages. We strongly believe in freedom of expression, even if a blog contains unappealing or distasteful content or presents unpopular viewpoints. We realize this may be frustrating, and we regret any inconvenience this may cause you. In cases where contact information for the author is listed on the page, we recommend that you work directly with this person to have the content in question removed or changed."

COMING SOON!

We take a look at more mysterious goings on in the Investment Property World after a tip-off from an anonymous poster, this time eminating from the investment advisory hotbed that is the Isle of Wight!

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