Alaska’s State Attorney General Gregg D. Renkes has now been tied to Jefferies & Company, which is KFx Inc.’s (AMEX: KFX, $7.90) leading stock promoter. On November 14, 2003, Mr. Renkes bought 3,000 shares of KFx stock on the trading day before Jefferies’ Frank Bracken appeared on CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer show and promoted KFx’s stock. Mr. Renkes also has ties to at least two shareholders and an employee of Kanturk Partners LLC. Kanturk is a recently created entity with no known established business and controlled by a group of KFx promoters and shareholders. Mr. Renkes did not disclose his Kanturk ties when he used Kanturk to promote KFx in Alaska.
Earlier we reported that Mr. Renkes had received compensation from KFx and held KFx stock before he promoted KFx’s most recent stock scheme without making relevant disclosures at the time of his KFx promotion. In fact, in 1999 Mr. Renkes’ firm was paid $40,000 by the then-owner of KFx’s current plant. The plant, which is supposedly being refurbished, is 10 years old and has never operated commercially. Obviously Mr. Renkes knows the plant failed to commercially upgrade coal of far higher quality than the Alaskan coal Mr. Renkes is promoting.
Mr. Renkes’ dealings with a Florida-based investment firm called U.S. Global LLC run by three former Jefferies employees, who have controlled more than 1 million KFx shares, link him to a questionable series of suspicious dealings with another KFx-related stock scheme.
During 2001 and 2002, Mr. Renkes was the Chairman of a newly formed company called Reliable Power Inc. In 2001 Reliable, a private company owned by KFx’s John P. Venners, made a bid to buy a small public Australian company. Mr. Renkes and J. Venners were Reliable’s only directors. Reliable claimed it would get funding for its bid from U.S. Global. On April 10, 2001 Australia’s securities regulators declared the Reliable bid “unacceptable” on the basis that it lacked sufficient funding and then stopped Reliable from continuing their bid.
Mr. Renkes’ Reliable dealings have an eerie similarity, in our view, to his recent Kanturk-inspired KFx scheme.
Scarlett Sasscers was Mr. Renkes’ employee at Reliable. Scarlett Sasscers currently works for Kanturk. J. Venners and Gerald S.J. Cassidy are Kanturk shareholders. Mr. Renkes has ties to both.
Mr. Renkes’ close associate in the discredited Reliable scheme, J. Venners, has a long history with KFx schemes. J. Venners is a co-founder and former Vice President of KFx and the brother of KFx’s current and long-time Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ted Venners. On June 29, 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against J. Venners alleging that from March 1997 through June 1998 he “artificially raised the closing price of KFX stock by purchasing at or near the close of the market.”
Before Mr. Renkes moved to Alaska, he and J. Venners lived 50 yards apart in Rivercrest Drive in Mc Lean, Virginia.
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