|
Friday, 02 November 2007 |
The world's most expensive cat…but is it a scam…???
Not only cats, it seems, have nine lives…some shady individuals in business seem to have them too. Controversial UK entrepreneur and convicted fraudster, Simon Brodie who founded the US company Allerca, which developed and marketed a genetically manipulated hypoallergenic cat, has put himself back in the news.
The Ashera, billed as the world's 'largest, rarest and most exotic' domestic cat, is the size of a small dog and sports eye-catching leopard-like spots and tiger stripes. The British businessman is selling the designer kittens for £10,796 plus shipping costs – and already has a nine-month waiting list. The Internet entrepreneur says he used a team of geneticists to develop the exotic cats at his US laboratory in San Diego.
read more
 According to Allerca the cat is a cross bred from two wild cats – the African serval and the Asian leopard cat – with one type of domestic cat, and stand more than 1m tall (3.3feet) on their hind legs and grow to a top weight of 30lb.
The London-born businessman, who started his company Lifestyle Pets in San Diego, California, said: 'The Ashera is unique. It's a beautiful cat, created using our special recipe. 'They are expensive, but we've already sold a lot in the US, in Asia and even in Russia. People who love beautiful pets will spend £12,000 on a cat, others spend that much on jewellery or a big TV.'
But many experts in the cat breeding business are crying fraud. According to them Allerca hasn’t developed anything new. They are merely selling a breed that already exists, it is called the Savannah cat and was first accepted for registration by The International Cat Association (TICA), the world's largest genetic registry of pedigreed cats, way back in the year 2000.
 One expert commented,” From the looks of the pictures attached to this press release, the Ashera they are peddling for $22,000 appears to be an F2 generation Savannah cat (two generations removed from the Serval) which would normally cost $3,500 to ~$5,000 from a reputable cat breeder, depending on quality. By keeping all information about the Ashera cat confidential, this means that the purchaser of an Ashera cat is buying a cat lacking a pedigree, which is the thing that normally means a cat is worth more money than a shelter kitty. The pictures supplied of the Ashera cat appear to show an inferior-quality Savannah, and the lack of a pedigree or registration papers backs up that impression. So as far as I can see, buying an Ashera cat is buying an unregistered inferior Savannah cat and paying five times as much for the privilege?”
Adding to the suspicion is the fact that Simon Brodie tried to buy some Savannah females, using a false name and company, but was refused. He said it was only to aid his “scientific research” but that’s a line that’s not easy to believe.
All pics below this line are of Savannah cats...judge for yourselves
The past of Simon Brodie does not exactly inspire confidence. He was was living high on the hog in 1991 when he drove a Lamborghini and ran Cloudhoppers, a hot air ballon company that fell to earth in the small town of Uckfield, East Sussex, owing banks some £214,000. Brodie was convicted in England of seven counts of false accounting in connection with the collapse of the company. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
 He rebounded five years later with a computer software company named Cybertech in the stylish Kensington area of London, but within a year, that venture went bust too, leaving a trail of consultants who sued for back salary. Amir Sheibany, now of Trans Union Credit in Chicago and late of Cybertech, remembers his old boss well. "He seemed competent and energetic," Sheibany says. "Polished." Sheibany, 38, also remembers the lawsuit he and others filed against Brodie. "We won a judgment of £35,000," he says, "but we didn't get any money. He said he never received any notification of the court case." Then, Sheibany says, he was gone.
In 1998, Brodie promoted Integra Information Technology, a Toronto company that recruited non-computer-literate people in England to pay 15,000 pounds, or about $25,000 at that time, to take a three-week Lotus Notes training course by promising them highly paid contracting work.
The price tag included flights to Integra's training center in Toronto, accommodations, software and vouchers for the cost of taking the Lotus exams on the clients' return to England. At the time, the cost of similar Lotus training, which typically required months to complete, was only about 2,000 pounds, or around $3,300, in the United Kingdom.
 In Delaware, in 1999, Brodie incorporated Cerentis LLC, which among other things sold software training packages to people in England. Peter Wood, 40, of Essex, England, said in an interview that he purchased one of these packages for more than $50,000, expecting to be trained and then employed.
Wood was trained at a California company called Alphalogix in the fall of 1999. But Brodie "disappeared," Wood said, before the three-week course was finished, leaving him without the job he had been promised. According to Los Angeles County court records, Brodie also stiffed Alphalogix, never paying $30,600 in training fees. "He's an extremely accomplished con man," Wood said. "He's obviously very good at what we call smoke and mirrors. He portrays a real professional company. But there's no depth to it at all."
According to court records, Cerentis, whose mailing address matched Brodie's New York address, failed to pay more than $50,000 in state taxes and has numerous liens against it.
In 2004, he popped up in Los Angeles with ForeverPet, a division of his Geneticas Life Sciences, Inc., offering to clone cats for US$19,950. His other business ideas included NightSave deer -- animals that would glow in the dark.
Brodie appears to be a person who can reinvent himself faster than Madonna, and leave a cold biographical trail to boot. Googling through thousands of references to him on the Internet, few basic facts -- and only two pictures -- emerge. In one newspaper story, Brodie is identified as a Scottish "scientist" from Invernesshire. However there are several references to his legal problems, past and present.
 With Allerca, Brodie may be enjoying his greatest success. In October 2004, when he announced his plans "to allow some of the millions of people with feline allergies to finally enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet," Brodie boasted that he was taking in a US$250 deposit each minute. The claims and the big money particularly rile Denver emergency room doctor David Avner.
Avner, 37, said he formed Transgenic about eight years ago, but the company went into "hibernation" for awhile because he couldn't get funding. At one point, he was trying to raise $2.5 million, and that's where Brodie came in.
He and Avner agreed to form a new corporation called Allerca Inc. which Brodie would fund, the lawsuit said. In September 2004, Brodie signed articles of incorporation and other documents acknowledging that Allerca Inc. would be a Colorado corporation with Avner as president and registered agent of the Colorado corporation, the lawsuit said. Geneticas was also to be a shareholder and invest $2.5 million.
But that didn't happen. Instead, in October, Brodie e-mailed Avner that he and Geneticas wouldn't participate in the venture but would honor the nondisclosure agreement, the lawsuit said. Two weeks later, Brodie incorporated a company called Allerca Inc. in California, naming himself president, and then contacted the press and publicized Transgenic's trade secrets, according to the lawsuit.
"Mr. Brodie stated and caused to be published a statement that Allerca of California was currently accepting $350.00 deposits for the shorthaired breed of transgenic cats it plans to ultimately market for $3,000 to $10,000," the lawsuit said. The press release was picked up by media outlets such as CNN, the Associated Press and WebMD Medical News. According to The Times Union in Albany, N.Y., Brodie hopes that by 2007 he's selling 200,000 British Shorthairs.
Under terms of a settlement of the lawsuit, Allerca had to shut down its Web site and agree not to re-enter the market for genetically engineered, allergen-free cats until after May 31, 2006. Allerca issued a news release June 7 claiming to have bred the allergen-free kittens first promised in 2004.
The Allerca Web site shows its October press release was picked up by media in Germany, Italy, Scotland and Russia.
In January of this year, Brodie and Allerca were sued in Orange County for defaulting on a $25,000 loan. In February, Allerca was evicted from its previous downtown headquarters, which was also Brodie's residence, for failure to pay rent. Last year, Brodie's Los Angeles landlords won a $3,900 judgment against Brodie for failure to pay rent.
Brodie and two other Brodie-affiliated companies, Cerentis and IntegraAssociates, also defaulted on a $72,280 promissory note, according to Los Angeles County court records. Last year, Brodie tried to raise $500,000 to fund an Allerca subsidiary, animal diagnostics firm GeneSentinel, of which he was chairman, president and chief executive. At the time, GeneSentinel listed assets of $3,000 and debts of $200,000.
This year, Brodie laid off some of the GeneSentinel employees; three former employees allege GeneSentinel owes them thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. Brodie acknowledges wages are owed to an unspecified number of former employees. GeneSentinel has since changed its name to Cyntegra.
Brodie said this week that he is not obligated to disclose his criminal record to potential Allerca franchisees or Allerca pet buyers. He said British press accounts about Cloudhoppers and his conviction “contain a number of inaccuracies,” but he acknowledged that he served “a sentence of under one year through a work-release program.”
Allerca, in a written statement, said the company is “fully aware of Mr. Brodie's personal history but that does not change the fact that Mr. Brodie has been instrumental in helping to create a product, a life, to help millions of allergy sufferers who always wanted to own a cat.” Both Allerca and Brodie said Brodie no longer has an ownership interest in Allerca; he continues to serve the company as a consultant.
Brodie and Allerca are promoting what some business experts and cat breeders view as a problematic business opportunity – a franchise in cats that costs $45,000 per “territory.”
Neither Allerca nor Brodie would disclose who owns Allerca or where the company is located, and they would not provide the names of scientists or breeding facilities involved in creation of Allerca's cats.
According to a recently filed U.S trademark application, Brodie and Allerca reside at The Grande condo complex in downtown San Diego. But that seems no longer to be true. Mr. Brodie has left California and set up shop in Delaware.
|
|
|
|
