Hot Topics For Today: Financials and Banning

Steorn was active today in the thread Sean can u clarify the financials? over in Steorn's forum. Steorn starts off by repeating their position:

There has been no new investment since August, I said this yesterday and for the past six months. Its that simple.

nleseul asks:

So is that new CRO document just reporting various transactions that happened during the first part of 2006, as crank is suggesting?

And Steorn replies:

Yep, this whole thing is what happens when you have a cynic trying to check accounts with no knowledge at all of what he is talking about - lol, its in a long list of errors that he has made on the subject, including accusing me of selling 750k's worth of shares.

There still seems to be some technical details regarding the dates of these transactions that are unclear based on what I've read here and in the forum. I haven't had a chance to review the CRO documents myself, so I'll wait to comment until I get a chance to read through them.

Also in the same thread Sean discusses the bannings of Ping and Big Oil Rep:

Well you cant really call pings banning a banning since he had set up a load of accounts, so its a bit of fun to be honest. Father Luke is a different matter.
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FLD/The Pope/BoR had crossed the line one too many times. ping has many accounts set up (they all have the same avatar), so thats just playing around.
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Lol, I could ban all of pings accounts in a few mins, but I have not seen anything recently that he has done that is ban worthy (you can always of course ask the question if one person should have multiple accounts). As for BoR he has posting information about Steorn that is factually incorrect, he could phrase this kind of stuff as a question, but the point he posted info that is stated as a fact and is just untrue and I strongly suspect that he knew it was untrue.

I apologize again for not getting a chance to transcribe the interview today. I listened to the interview while driving, and I especially want to pull out some of Sean's comments regarding Magnetic Viscosity and Sv.

One final note, if you didn't get a chance to view the UCD debate, I noticed that Dispatches from the Future has links to working versions of the videos on YouTube. Check it out while they last!

More Bannings, Financial Questions

Today "a" aka Ping1400 was banned in the forums for the umpteenth time, Big Oil Rep was also banned. They were most likely banned due to the discussion on Steorn's financials, which started when Big Oil Rep quoted Thicket's questions in the forum here. At first I wasn't connecting Thickets dots, but then nleseul dug this up:

I withdraw my earlier argument. Steorn filed a document with the CRO on April 3, 2007 showing an allotment of 5,284 ordinary shares for a total of 8.4 million euros cash on March 26, 2007.

crank may have an explanation:

Shares can be issued up to three years after the money has changed hands, as far as I know. I checked with an accountant friend when that article was published, and the share issue things were downloaded, to see if the shares would have been paid for at the time they were issued. He laughed at me

It would be nice to get a clarification from Steorn on this one. In regards to the phone interview, I didn't get a chance tonight to pull out the good quotes. Hopefully I'll have some time this weekend. If anyone else feels up to the challenge, it would be greatly appreciated!

SciGuy Reports and More Bannings

Today the only activity in the forums had to do with a few bannings. Unfortunately no explanation was given, but as nleseul points out in a comment here:

Just a guess, but maybe if one account was banned for being obnoxious, then the other two were banned for the same reason, being that they, you know, belong to the same person.

The most interesting part of the whole banning activity was learning that the administrator nosy banned them. I didn't even know there was an admin named nosy!

Also today the SciGuy from Houston, Eric Berger, published a blog entry with an update on Steorn. Eric contacted Dr. Jeff Bechtold and actually spoke with him briefly:

I contacted Jeff earlier this month and received a polite reply, but he wouldn't spill any goods on what Steorn is up to, or what he thinks of the technology.

Dr. Bechtold's silence to me implies that he's definitely a jury member. We've seen how potential jury members who didn't get select react when asked questions.

A Video and a Banning

In the forums today, Sean links us to this fun video exploring Steorn's office:


As Fiksu_Vekotin puts it "The people working at Steorn are actually.. people." It's nice to see some of their labs and the upbeat tempo of the Steorn employees.

On a sad note for some of us, as seen in previous comment posts here at SteornTracker, Thicket and his 11 or so other usernames have all been and his username Thicket_ have been banned from the Steorn forums. Thicket posted a now removed post insulting Sean, and I assume it was the straw that broke the camels back.

edit: I've updated the info on Thickets banning, my mistake. There were others banned also yesterday, and it is unclear why some of them were. We don't have a reason for some of the bannings, and we realize it's Sean's prerogative to ban anyone he chooses. We're almost getting to the point where we need an independent forum ;-(.

Shooting the Messenger

Crank has banned my account on the forums. Here is her reasoning:

I banned Steorntracker, because he requested to be allowed to join at a time when new joining was suspended. He said that he wouldn't publish confidential information, but did.

He can read the forums just like anyone else. He doesn't post anyway, so it won't make much difference to him, but I don't see why he should be accommodated when he didn't keep his word.

Steorn and Crank have every right to ban me from their forum, it's their forum. It's silly though to accuse me of publishing confidential information.