Wellington-based businessman, Nicholas Down is the quintessential “horse-trader from hell” – a guy with Autism whose creative, flexible mind can tackle the toughest trade imaginable!
Give him something to trade or sell, and he’ll do a deal somewhere, somehow to solve your problem. He is of course a skilled auctioneer – that’s his business, and he’s good at it.
But Nic will bend and stretch the rules, until they break, and then some and he did this with Bartercard. His take is that he just stretched them. Theirs was that he broke them.
Getting offside with a manager who ‘got his dander up’ resulted in a lengthy litigation that frustrated Nic’s business opportunities, negatively affected his financial situation and had a serious long-term impact upon his family situation.
He was facing bankruptcy over the dispute.
Nic approached me knowing from my blogging that I was ‘onto’ the crooks he was fighting. He hoped that I could help him. Indeed, I did. I became his McKenzie Friend in his court battle, helping him to secure a defended hearing (as opposed to a summary judgement) then to commence a counterclaim and we generally make life very uncomfortable for the entity that had done the same to him for the preceding three or four years.
TIP 6:
Entering into litigation is an easy decision for a business skilled in utilising the legal system for their pecuniary gain. This advantage though can be reversed with exposure. Negative press is something that all crooks are desperate to avoid.
Bartercard sought to prevent exposure of the case, however their attempts to close down my blogging backfired as it only generated more negative press. From my perspective, I used Nic’s case to develop my claim that Bartercard could not legitimately claim that their currency wasn’t grossly debased. Evidence from Australia that Bartercard management had been buying their own currency at only 20c in the dollar proved that fraud was afoot.
Bartercard’s claims that their dodgy currency was on a par with the local currency were just lunacy (as everybody knew its true value) and they were arguably criminal. My blogging had shown that they had expertise at hiding debt, quoting a senior business manager!
The fraud was eventually exposed, the heat going on sufficiently that the Chairman advised the entire global industry that litigation had begun against me – and in multiple jurisdictions. It was a totally false claim [duh!] as no crook wants their dirty laundry aired in public, and proven to be so in due course with, sadly for me, not even the smell of court!
I exposed their scam when ‘going public’ in realtime and showed not only that their IPO was a nonsense, but I also showed the world how the fraud was perpetuated by those in the industry with vested interests.
Bartercard eventually settled with Nic and surprise-surprise, Nic received some cash. A nice result when he’d been facing bankruptcy at their hands previously!
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