Friday, May 28, 2010

About this blog

First, nothing here is legal advice or accounting advice, or any kind of advice at all.  It is just a place for people to share links they find. 

There are two excellent sources that already exist for information about HL Leasing.  

The first is http://www.leasingnews.org, a site that originally broke the story about the possibility that HL Leasing was an alleged ponzi scheme.  A very detailed and recent post can be found here.  In fact, Kit Menkin's leasingnews.org is such a valuable source of information that anybody seriously interested in getting a feel for historical and current news coverage of John Otto should click this link to all of the pages on leasingnews discussing John Otto.  Similar lists of leasingnews coverage can and should also be generated for HL Leasing, Heritage Pacific Leasing, and Centerpoint Financial.

The second source is http://johnottohlleasing.blogspot.com,  and there are well over 100 comments on one of the pages of that blog sharing information.

We do not want this blog to replace the johnottohlleasing blog, which is a great central point of contact.  This blog is for the creation of specific entries with information that people learn, organized by subject.  So this is more of a site for people to share their investigation leads.

The hope is that there are a lot of people looking at this and everybody is researching it in their own way, but by compiling and organizing what people find, the path to figuring out what happened will be shortened.

You should assume that if there were co-conspirators (I'm not saying that there were, opinions on the other blog seem to differ), they are reading these blogs.  So of course, some things should be sent to law enforcement and not posted (if you think think that the information will just end up leading the co-conspirators to move an asset you find, for example).  Also don't post anything confidential learned from your lawyers without clearing it with them first.

Anyhow, please post comments on this page listing other sources of information (i.e. other blogs, etc.).  We will try to incorporate the comments into the main body of the entry (so for example, if somebody puts a link to a copy of a lease assignment in the comments to the entry about locating assets, we will try to incorporate that into the main entry on the topic). Please be patient if incorporating the information takes some time.

We are going to try to keep the body of the entries accurate, so guesses and unsourced information put into the comments may be good leads for research, but will stay in the comments until somebody comes up with a link or a source.