Open Letter to Marlin Leasing by Christopher Menkin, editor Leasing News attempted several times in the last few days to reach Marlin Business Service corporate officers for a comment on recent Security Exchange Commission filings. E-mails and telephone calls were not returned. Even Michael Bennie didn't want to respond. The main PR man, according to the press releases and records, George Pelose, general counsel and secretary, doesn't even return telephone calls. We don't even try to reach him any more, as it is evident they are afraid to talk to us. I guess the officers think we are just a trade publication for the leasing industry, which we are. However, I should inform them that we turn Marlin NASDAQ stock investors down from subscribing and let them know we have never received a response from about the CFO resigning and the deal made to him, or about the filing dated June 30, 2006 and recorded by the Security Exchange Commission on July 11,2006, JP Morgan Chase & Company is the “beneficial owner of 1,237,110 shares of stock...Percent of class: 10.4%” (roughly $27,055,595 a few days ago.) We really don't want the consumers reading us, as most don't understand the business, plus what we generally write would be very boring to them such as "Lefebre Appointed First Chair Business Council," or John Winchester Chairman of One World, or Bruce Kropschot bringing leasing sales teams to new companies, or FASB. To them, this is “trade news” and would be of very little interest. I tell them this when I inform they we are not giving them an e-mail subscription. It would throw off our web trend account of stories opened. One of the reasons we named our publication Leasing News was I figured readers who wanted information about a company would use that. For instance, if you search Google with “Marlin leasing news” we are number one and two on the list. If you use Yahoo, an ELA press release comes first and we are number two and four. Other browsers put us as number one, and rarely are we not in the top three. After our last story, Marlin Business Service stock went from a high yesterday of $20.80 to a low of $19.93, down $1.10 (5.225) on a volume of 30,258.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/webquote.dll?Symbol=MRLN Certainly we are not the Wall Street Journal, although some readers have referred to us as the Leasing Wall Street Journal. Others use language we can't print here, but the fact is we are read not only by employees of leasing companies, often their presidents and officers too, but also by investors and consumers. If you want the inside news first, the real thing, not the “spin” press releases, we get the readers. The Alexa/Google listing shows us second in the group, right behind the American Bankers Association web site, much larger and a daily. We usually only publish three times a week, so to get these ratings, above the dailies, means we are read. We don't know about: Money Central reported on 06-30-06 10:27 AM This stock experienced unusually high trading volume of 423,219 shares today; its average daily volume over the previous 30 days was 26,369 shares. And have not reported on: Officers Salaries: I can personally tell you officers of Marlin Business Services, not responding is not going to make us go away. In fact, it is surprising that a successful company appears to have something to hide in to being forthcoming, even on Security Exchange Commission public filings. It makes us want to dig deeper as we think there must be more to the story we don't know about. Why can't you tell us about these SEC filings? Christopher Menkin, editor |
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