Everest Wealth Management, who threatened the blog Long Term Returns with legal action earlier this year, and forced it offline, has now threatened the MMM site for discussing their actions related to LTR.
(Note: this is a threat separate from the legal threats from KISS Trust, discussed here:
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/kiss-trust-has-sent-a-legal-threat-to-this-blog/)
The comments made by the author of Long Term Returns about Everest Wealth Management were quoted and discussed in this thread:
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/long-term-returns/Bogleheads has a thread discussing the LTR site being taken down by the Everest Wealth Management group lawsuit threats as well:
http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=118571Everest Wealth Management claims the comments LTR made, that we quoted and discussed, are libelous. MMM, who is having a lawyer review the situation, edited the thread to replace the LTR's author's comments with this:
A Note from MMM about Everest Wealth Management:
I decided to remove the quote that was originally in this box. It wasn't very interesting - just some guy's opinion that Everest could not really guarantee a 7% return. But it is still easily available elsewhere on the Internet. I thought the following information would be even more useful for people researching the company.
A guy named Philip Rousseaux, founder and President of Everest Wealth Management started hassling me by email about this forum thread. He claimed it contained "libelious" information that was damaging his firm, and hinted that if I did not take it down he would be "forced to refer this to counsel".
Why? Because this thread had made it to page 2 on Google search results for people searching for the company by name. He didn't like this.
So this is a company that seems to have a policy of policing the Internet and attempting to take down content that they feel is damaging to them. Rather than trying to post a response with their side of the story, the company decided to ask me - with threat of legal action -to delete the whole thing.
I'll leave it up to you if this is the type of company you would like to have managing your wealth.
Looks like the MMM blog & forum is starting to get some serious love from Google in the search rankings, and the companies who may not offer the best products are worried.
These guys must not be familiar with the Streisand Effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effectIt's unfortunate that companies, rather than come defend their products, and/or let whatever is said be said, resort to abusing the legal system.
If that's their position, fine. They can try to force us to remove content, but they can't stop us from discussing it.
Let's hope this eventually becomes front page of Google for Everest Wealth Management, and those potential or current customers of Everest Wealth Management reading this can decide, as MMM said, if that's the type of company you want to be dealing with.
(All of the above is my own opinion, and does not necessarily representative of the opinion of the owner of this blog.)