Photo from Brian Paes-Braga’s private
Instagram account, September 2018.
Lithoquest Diamonds Inc (LDI.v) has quite a tale to tell, one that lays bare the dirty, underhand and likely illegal way in which the scumbag Frank Giustra acolyte, Brian Bri-Bri Paes-Braga, along with the merry band of pranksters that have congregated around Tommy Humphrey’s Vancouver scam pump website CEO.ca, manipulate share prices, strong-arm companies and try to extort them into one-way deals that benefit nobody bar the Paes-Braga gang of thieves.
LDI is a recently set-up exploreco run by an experienced and peer-respected diamond hunter, Bruce Counts. It put together its company structure and raised IPO cash (at 27c, with attached warrants at 40c) late last year and eventually went public in 2018. At first it did well, on the back of positive early exploration results at its property in Western Australia. It hit an apparent setback in early August when it returned dusters at one of its targets, but since then about a month ago the good exploration news has returned, when it hit exactly the kind of Kimberlite structure one needs for diamond prospecting in this news release.
If you didn’t know any different, you’d think the NRs above explain the share price movements seen this year. But once you know what Brian Paes-Braga has been doing in the background, the sharp movements seen and the latest lackluster phase becomes crystal in its clarity.
This slimeball has a modus operandi and this certainly isn’t the first time he and his gang of two-faced slimeballs has used it, but this time it’s come to light. Here’s how it works:
1) At the funding stage, Brian Paes-Braga (or the bankroll behind him, e.g. Fiore and Frank Giustra) takes a chunk of the funding placement and get hands on a significant amount of shares.2) Then once the funding is done and the new exploreco in place, Brian sets up a new private company and buys up a whole swathe of concessions all around the new company. In fact, Bri-Bri has learned this scheme from his new BFF Tim Young and how that particular toerag works his way around the Canadian Athabasca, but the way in which this dynamic duo got together to rip off the Chinese who bought Lithium-X (my stars, there’s a bunch of people with buyers’ regret that’s only cured by suicide) has emboldened this team to the point where they think they can export their extortionate business model to the world.3) So, LDI sets itself up and welcomes Bri-Bri, unbeknown to them Bri-Bri secures large-scale concession land around the LDI property. The company gets into gear and goes public.4) Soon after the IPO, Bri-Bri phones up LDI CEO Brian Courts and informs him that he has a private concern with the concession land around LDI’s gig in Western Australia. In fact what Bri-Bri has nailed down is pure kangaroo pasture, worth zero-zip-nada in economic geological terms, but that doesn’t matter to the two-faced shyster. What matters is the shakedown so Bri-Bri offers this adjacent land to LDI at a crazily inflated price. LDI says thanks but no thanks.5) Then comes August 20th. Yes for sure LDI released news that wasn’t positive, but there’s no way it deserved to be whacked the way it did from 50c down to 15c and on massive volume. And the reason it got hit so hard was Bri-Bri, who had been waiting for his moment to sexually intercourse the LDI share price deliberately and for his own ends. He and his pals hit on the bid time and again with his cheap entry shares and cave the price.6) Then comes the moment that isn’t just strategic, it’s plain straight extortion. Paes-Braga phones up LDI again and even though it was his selling (via Anon and oh-what-a-surprise-Haywood) that pushed the price so low, he complains bitterly to the company management about the negative NR, the subsequent price dump, the lack of fiduciary care, the way in which shareholder concerns were being ignored, the whole nine yards. He then offers to LDI the opportunity to buy the land he has around the project, once again at a crazily over-inflated price, as well as telling Courts that the project would be better off in their hands and by reversing into his privco, the change in management control would be simple and easy. Meanwhile, Bri-Bri makes it abundantly clear on the call that if LDI doesn’t play ball and accept his offer, the share price pain will continue.7) Fortunately, Brian Courts is neither naive not lacking internal fortitude. He sees straight through the Bri-Bri attempt at extorting money from his company and tells him to go make love to his own body all alone. Perhaps because Courts and LDI knew their company was far from dead and had plenty of good new to offer on its project, as witnessed a few days later on September 10th.8) However, even though the LDI share price bounced nicely from the 15c level it failed to re-gain the 50c line of before and it’s been telling that in recent days, its been reeled in from the 30c mark it managed to reach, down to the latest 23c or so. There’s no particular reason as to why it should have stalled this way, apart from the suspicious manner in which the bid has been hit on occasion. LDI has all the hallmarks of a share price that’s being boxed in and, consider the way Bri-Bri has already tried to extort LDI out of a massive amount of cash in exchange for worthless kanagaroo pasture (that he hasn’t even paid for it’s still in application stage) it’s clear to anyone with an IQ over 80 and a couple of years in Canadian capital markets that the manipulator of August 20th is at it again. That’s Bri-Bri.
I suppose that more than anything else, this post exists for the junior explorecos to come that get offers from Bri-Bri to participate in their placement offerings. It may look like a neutral thing to you, a business-is-business exchange of a minor slice of your company’s equity for the Fiore-backed cash but what you’re really doing is opening the door to a whole house of pain, This scumball doesn’t just want your shares and warrants, he’ll use the slightest leverage plus the tricks learned from Athabasca Tim to get his claws deeply into your company and he won’t let go until he’s screwed you for all the money he can squeeze from you. Therefore IKN applauds Lithoquest (LDI.v) for standing up to this scumball, to the point where without a single word coming out of the C-Suite this humble corner of cyberspace has testimony from two different and trustworthy sources about the dirty tricks and extortion tactics Bri-Bri uses to screw explorecos. One wonders how may times he and his scumbag cohorts have already got away with this modus operandi.