U of M Forestry school accuses Victor Industries of lying

A Missoula company in trouble with the federal Securities Exchange Commission has now run afoul of the University of Montana
School of Forestry.

By Michael Moore of Montana Lee Newspapers

In mid-March, Victor Industries issued a press release with this headline: “ University of Montana School of Forestry to Test Victor Industries
Envirolizer Product.” The release said the company had entered a “ collaborative agreement” with the forestry school.

“ That’s just a lie,” Perry Brown, dean of the forestry school, said Monday. “ We have no relationship with them. We are not in business with them in
any way.”

Ron Pellett, a management consultant for Victor, said the problem may simply be the wording in the press release.
“ It seems like semantics to me,” Pellett said.

Victor Industries drew the SEC’s ire in late February after selling millions of shares of unregistered stock. Two of the company’s principals, Pellett and
Penny Sperry, have agreed to pay civil fines and to repay pro ceeds from the sales, which grossed about $135,000. Those amounts are still to be
deter mined, according to the SEC.

Victor Industries trades as a penny stock on the Nasdaq’s over-the-counter bulletin boards. Last summer, the stock literally was trading at a penny
when it began to run up after the company issued a series of press releases trum peting a new fertilizer prod uct. Eventually the stock traded as high
as 26 cents, with Sperry and Pellett, who once were married, selling millions of shares that sup posedly had been transferred to other investors.

“ It turns out it was a com plete scam,” Marc Fagel, an SEC official in San Francisco, said in late February.

The SEC generally frowns on companies that engage in what’s referred to as “ pumpand-dump” tactics — hyping a stock to push up the price, then
dumping it as unwitting buyers step in.
“ The publicity campaign waged by Pellett and Sperry served the purpose of gener ating investor interest in Victor, allowing the defen dants and
the stock promot ers they had retained to unload their stock at substan tial profit without disclosing to the public their control over the outstanding
shares of Victor stock,” the SEC’s complaint states.

Brown said an associate dean has called the company and asked it to correct the press release, but was told “ it was more trouble than it was worth.”

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