Posted on 02/03/2004 10:25:09 AM PST by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
This week began just as usual on the sleepy Yahoo Finance Web site where Southern Co.'s investors post their thoughts occasionally. A message or two a day, nothing exciting. Someone mentioned an upcoming dividend.
Someone answered: Southern Co. "remains a safe harbor, except for the MIR fiasco, which still bugs me," the poster wrote, referring to the now-bankrupt Southern spinoff, Mirant Corp. A few hours later, investors burned in that fiasco roared in and hijacked Southern's placid message board. By Monday night, they had overrun the Yahoo message site assigned to Mirant's former parent. These were the same investors who populated Mirant's own Yahoo message board until Monday afternoon.
Even in Mirant's one good year, they chatted incessantly about it, unlike the parent's reticent investors. They posted new thoughts by the second, chatted into the night and eventually became each other's moral support when Mirant's finances drove it into Chapter 11 last summer. They also used the Mirant message board, post-bankruptcy, to pool pledges of each other's stock and win one of their own a seat on the committee representing shareholders in Mirant's bankruptcy case. Then, the unthinkable: On Monday afternoon, Yahoo wiped out the Mirant board, along with every other message board devoted to a stock not listed on a major exchange.
Yahoo's explanation for the move was that it didn't have the resources to continue hosting Web sites for penny stocks. The suddenly homeless Mirant message posters flitted from one alternative site to another in search of each other. Then they regrouped and noisily swarmed the board of the company that spawned them, Southern Co. "I'm sure these folks won't mind," wrote one.
In one day, the site that boasted a couple of messages per day at best had more than 200 related to Mirant. Southern spokesman Mike Tyndall said the takeover was no big deal and that there was nothing the company could do about a site that is controlled by somebody else, in this case Yahoo. Mirant investors said Tuesday they didn't like the message Yahoo had sent by lumping their company in with bankrupt companies like Enron, which also lost its Yahoo site Monday. Unlike the others, they say, Mirant's investors stand a chance of recouping at least something and have good reason to continue to chat.
They said they could start their own board but that they like Yahoo. They also like the idea of airing their troubles on the site dedicated to their ancestor, whose stockholders did quite well after the Mirant spinoff. "Many of us are delighted to somehow stick it a little to Southern," investor David Zuskin explained.
I beg to differ...market circumstances are largely reponsible and the banks may be involved in having precipitated the situation. No fraud along the scale of Enron has even been charged. Your evaluation is way off mark.
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