Don’t buy these shares
p. 33 · Read in the full issue
By David North
CONFIDENCE men used to try to sell gullible investors New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge. Now they are being asked to finance an electrical generator in Palau.
That’s the thrust — if not the exact wording — of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s warning about a firm called Pacific Waste Management Inc. of Reno, Nevada (the old gambling town.) The SEC regulates America’s stock markets; when stock offerings are really suspect it takes the unusual step of suspending trading of the stock in question. It did so earlier this year for Pacific Waste’s proposal to build an electrical generator in Palau, to be fueled by toxic wastes, such as sewage sludge, used chemicals, and coal tailings. Pacific Waste said that the plant would burn the material while generating inexpensive power and would not hurt the environ ment.
Both the Mainland and the island environmental protection agencies said it was a bad idea; SEC passed along that informatiion, and noted that the plant did not yet exist, and that the consti tution of Palau had a provision banning nuclear materials and other toxic matter.
SEC also said that “questions had been raised about the company’s financial ability to build and operate such a plant.”
A mildy vigilant investor might have noticed some other warning signals, for instance: • The firm in question was incorpor ated a couple of years ago as Pacific Water Sports, Inc., then became the Detroit Engine Corporation, and then Pacific Waste Management, Inc. (Solid companies rarely change their names, certainly not repeatedly.) • The firm’s principal ally in Palau was John O. Ngiraked, a special assistant to the President of Palau (Ngiratkel Etpison) who had endorsed the proposal; Ngiraked, a former Minister of State, was recently indicted for plotting to kill Palau’s first president, and is now under house arrest in Palau. • Overseas investors were badly burned a few years earlier when a collection of fast-talking folk from the First and Third Worlds put together the IPESCO power plant in Palau. Costing more than $30,000,000 originally, the generator makes all the electricity the islands need, and more, but thanks to a combination of chicanery, corruption and the bankruptcy of the plant’s builder, nobody has paid anybody any thing for the construction of the plant.