But today, the iron and steel stocks are the market leaders, and despite there being no reason for the Toronto Stock Exchange to continue to allow trading in shares that a judge has ruled are to be struck from the share register, Stelco shares DOUBLED in price at the open today. So I'm thinking about it.

And I'm sure that the Stelco PR office is really pleased that their puff piece was reproduced this morning under the byline of TorStar News Service writer Dierdre Healey. This so-called journalistic endeavour made me want to puke.

And the photo of Ontario Superior Court Justice James Farley with his quote, "(Despite) global warming; I think we can report to the world that glaciers are alive and well at Stelco" made me say to myself: "Farley you can report anything you want, but it doesn't mean squat. Some of us don't believe a word you say. All we'd like to know is how much you and your friends got paid on this deal."

And then I got a letter from Bruce, who I don't think has written me before:

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"Hi Bill: It is very odd to me that nobody has picked up on this Stelco thing. I am not a shareholder; but I am a Chartered Accountant and I agree with everything you say, including the whole engineered fraud thing.

I have sent letters to the Vancouver Sun, Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, the Globe & Mail, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen. I have sent letters to several MPs.

Nothing.

The article I see in the Toronto Star today is how happy the little old lady is that Stelco is coming out of bankruptcy protection:

But her worries of falling into poverty have disappeared now that plans are being finalized to bring the steel company out of protection by March 31. "I feel safe now," said Hill, who has been following Stelco's financial troubles from the start. "I feel like a weight has been lifted off me. For so long I was scared of losing my pension. Losing that would mean losing everything."

How about all the little old ladies and men (and everybody else like my 70 year old father who is a shareholder) who had their equity wiped out by plundering in the company they held shares in. Unbelievable!!!

Why is NOBODY picking up on this story of legitimized piracy? I am beginning to think that maybe it is just me.

Best regards, Bruce"

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Thank you Bruce.

Actually, there still is no Plan of Arrangement, so the Toronto Stock Exchange is helping the judge avoid a charge of facilitating fraudulent conversion. But, that's what friends do for one another.

Now you see why I get back spasms.

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p.s., I see that Stelco management (the ones who just won Lotto Canada) have applied to the TSX to delist the old shares on March 10. Interesting precedent here given that there still is no Plan of Arrangement.

Isn't it interesting how this group of scoundrels always manages to force the timing to their advantage -- like on Friday's (as in the 10th of March). They did the same thing at every other major milestone. That of course is a lawyer's ploy so that any opposition can be countered by taking the weekend to get their ducks in a row.

This is such a crock. Management says Stelco liabilities are greater than their assets. How much did they value the mining assets, or the land, or the goodwill linked to their plans to go into windpower, and so forth? Those assets were reasons why legit investment was made by the shareholders of Stelco, and today are part of the reason Stelco's same size cross-town rival Dofasco is being valued at $6 billion.

But this rogue management claims those assets have no value today. (Expletive deleted). Management will immediately give them value after these old shares are struck from the share register. Just watch the new IPO to see.

Sounds every bit like a fraudulent conveyance to me, but then again there were 39 different law firms working to engineer this fraud, including all the biggest in Canada. It seems that non-lawyers like me are the only ones asking questions of law.

But then, we're not the ones on the take.

What this Stelco case has proved to me is that vested interests of a select group of people are bigger than free capital markets.