Article Critical Of Sao Tome Was Forgery

Confirming that the article posted yesterday morning on the Guardian of Nigeria "Energy Report" page was the work of a hacker - likely the same one who struck the Guardian shortly before the May 31 awards with questionable ERHC Energy content - the newspaper removed the offending story without comment today. All the other stories from yesterday remain.

The article was originally at http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/business/article02 and
is no longer there or at the Business page, http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/business, It has been reoplaced by the story that has occuopied that space for two or three days.

This reporter spotted a number of anomalies that were present with the first hack; only one of them turned out to be incidental. The person who posted the article to Investors Hub and much later provided a link to it was a well-known Raging Bull poster with the alias mrken. He had posted the article on Investor's Hub under the name "mrrhodes," he explained. He is believed to be also known as "Swinging K," a notorious pump 'n dump scammer, from earlier posts on Raging Bull. mrken is believed to be his "kinder, gentler" alias.

Like an earlier hack involving an ERHC Energy story, the article was double-spaced, had no byline and was not indexed on the front page of the Guardian in the Energy summary box even though it was one of the top two stories on the page.

Now the SEC may want to examine the source of the hack, which was apparently intended to accelerate the share price of ERHC Energy (OTC symbol: ERHE) so that an unknown investor, probably traders such as Mongo, Swinging K, walldog0 or TopDrive, some of whom work in tandem, could dispose of shares at a higher price than would normally be offered for a stock that is under a purported investigation. Conversely, the article could have been intended to use a nugget of fact with a pound of rhetoric to further antagonize Sao Tome officials against the company.

Servers from the Dept. of Justice's Baltimore, Md., office have visited this blog three times in the past two business days following a request 10 days ago from the Attorney General of Sao Tome and Principe for the U.S. Justice Dept. to investigate oil concession awards in the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone last May 31. That has raised suspicion in these quarters that the U.S. Attorney's office in Potomac, Md., headed by U.S. Atty. Ron Rosenstein, is reviewing the report.

The number and variety of attacks on ERHC Energy, and their generally clandestine nature, has led many observers to believe that they all originate with the company's powerful foe, ExxonMobil Corp. of Irving, Tex., which has also been a frequent visitor to this site in recent days along with Anadarko Petroleum, which tried to team with ExxonMobil to gain control of Block 4 after bidding deadlines had passed. The block was won by ERHC Energy and Noble Energy, which has since been replaced by Addax Petroleum of Switzerland.