Company has murky past.
The battle over Live Current Media’s board is heating up, and with each war of words more of the company’s questionable past comes out into the open.
In Live Current’s Preliminary Proxy Statement for its upcoming meeting, current CEO Geoffrey Hampson said he began to have a falling out with the Jeffs family after Hampson didn’t have Live Current buy the web site Makeup.com.
Confused? Take a look at the players.
David Jeffs – former President of Live Current
Richard Jeffs – David’s father
Geoffrey Hampson – current CEO and Chairman of Board
According to the proxy statement, Richard Jeffs wanted Live Current to purchase Makeup.com, a company that Richard Jeffs said he controlled. Live Current reviewed the idea but ultimately passed. The relationship between Hampson and Jeffs deteriorated from there, at least according to the statement.
Have you heard of Makeup.com before? There are two reasons. First, L’Oreal bought it for seven figures earlier this year.
Second, and more importantly, Live Current used to own Makeup.com back when Live Current was called Communicate.com. Communicate.com sold the domain name to Manhattan Assets Corp along with Automobile.com, Exercise.com, and Call.com. But you know what? Richard Jeffs served as a director at Manhattan Assets Corp.
Come again? Basically members of the Jeffs family purchased Automobile.com, Exercise.com, Call.com and Makeup.com from Communicate.com. Then they “sold” Call.com back to Communicate.com in order to eliminate an ongoing royalty payment provision while Richard’s son was still President of the company. Later, Richard allegedly asked Live Current to also buy Makeup.com back. [Update: I am told that Richard Jeffs was not a director at Manhattan when the original deal was done; he was a director when the sell back of Call.com occurred].
Richard Jeffs was also a party to a settlement with the British Columbia Securities Commission (the “BCSCâ€) in April 2007. It turns out the Jeffs family is tied to what The Vancouver Sun called a boiler room.
One of the stocks it pushed was Communicate.com.
chris says
That Vancouver Sun article was very interesting, it is funny that a reporter can dig up all those facts and clearly demonstrate illegal activity, yet those people are not in jail.
Einstein says
“yet those people are not in jail.”
That’s why they keep doing it and doing it. If they are ever caught they settle for 10% of what they stole and probably probation. Then they move to another state and start again
Kelly Monson says
Speaking of jail, once Geoff Hampson is voted out by the shareholders of LIVC & the new management goes over his expenses with a fine tooth comb, how much gross & fraudulent expenses do you thing they will find? If they find as much as people think they will, he will be charged….criminally.
BinkyBoy says
All of this bunk about what Hampson supposedly chatted about with Richard Jeffs is totally irrelevant to the proxy challenge and an obvious attempt by Hampson to distract attention from the many reasons why he is finally facing an intense investor revolt.
Shareholders have many reasons – too many actually to write in this space – to want to throw out Hampson and the current board and anger has been mounting since 2008 with the disastrous auctomatic and cricket deals which contributed to tanking shareholder value by 90+ percent and bringing LIVC to the brink. Not to mention his decision put his girlfriend in charge of perfume.com, the only major revenue source for the company in early 2009 – recently promoting her to VP – and sales are down 60 percent.
Don’t even get me started with Corelink, which both Hampson and fellow LIVC director James Taylor were senior officers of and which Hampson founded a few months after he took over at LIVC.
If L’oreal acquired makeup.com for more than 7 figures, it sure beats the crap out of the paltry $160,000 that Hampson just sold importers.com for.
James says
As I was reading the article, I had the theme tune to ‘Soap’ in my head – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_%28TV_series%29