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The epic battle of ex-con turned fraud investigator Barry Minkow vs. Usana Health Sciences (NASDAQ: USNA) gets more one-sided by the day. In a YouTube video posted on March 27th, Minkow visited numerous vitamin stores to show that Usana products are hopelessly overpriced compared to the competition. Usana contacted the owner of one of the stores, Nutrimart, threatening to sue him if he didn't demand that Minkow remove the video from YouTube. They accused him of unfair competition.
But Brian Mohr didn't back down. In an email, he told BloggingStocks that he had not even heard of Usana before he was approached by Minkow with request for comparable products. However since then, he has "discovered several people I already knew had been 'taken' by this company. I have numerous people that have stories of their involvement. I really feel this is a big story waiting to become even bigger. Layer upon layer peels back only to reveal more craziness."
And craziness it is. As Minkow says in the YouTube video above, "Desperate people do desperate things" and a NASDAQ-listed company threatening to sue a small business owner over a YouTube video seems desperate.
In the press release accompanying the release of the new YouTube video, Minkow quotes Penn State Professor Manfred Kroger: "The only one guilty of misrepresentation is Usana...Neither Nutrimart nor Mr. Minkow should be accused of misrepresentation, but Usana should be when it attempts to justify the substantially higher price and superiority of their products through pseudoscience and innuendo appealing to some scientific criteria which do not exist."
In another exciting, and perhaps incriminating development for Usana, Minkow also interviewed a man who said that a Usana pitchman had claimed that Usana products would be about 100% more expensive if sold through traditional retail channels. This appears not to be the case, and may constitute yet another material misrepresentation from Usana.
For more of my coverage of the Usana Health Sciences story, check these posts on BloggingStocks:
Usana Health Sciences invokes the Chewbacca Defense
Usana's Conference Call: Analyst Incompetence on Display
Goldman Earnings Sink After Buffett Dividend
Johnson & Johnson's Income Falls 23%
Burberry Shares Leap on Sales Update
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-24-2007 @ 12:10PM
michael webster said...
The representation to the public that the products would 100% more expensive if USANA used the traditional method of distribution is very important, in my opinion.
I would be interested to see what justification there is for this earnings claim.
5-31-2007 @ 1:19AM
SanDee said...
Barry is a criminal full of crap, and needs to get a life. The shop owner on your youtube video is not a scientist and was probably paid by Barry, because he cannot let things go about Usana. Barry needs to do his homework properly and then get some proper attention!!