Open Letter to the shareholders of Rolltronics, Voltaflex and Seertech, and other interested parties

Hello. My name is Michael Sauvante, and I am writing this letter, and assembling this website, in an attempt to set the record straight regarding accusations that have been made against me, my wife, and my colleagues. I have received legal advice advising me not to write such a letter. But poor legal advice has helped get us to this point, primarily with respect to filing for bankruptcy (we didn't need to) so I am going to ignore it and hope for the best. Thank you for taking the time to look further into this matter.

I am writing this however, not just to try and clear my name, but also to try and provide some peace of mind to the many investors who shared our dreams and trusted us with their money to make those dreams come true. Sadly, our attempts failed, and for that I am deeply sorry.

But now those investors are being told that the failure was because of fraud and lies. I feel that this is adding insult to their financial injury. To those investors, many of whom are close friends and family, let me say unequivocally that there was no fraud here. Every single penny of investor money is accounted for in the books.

I know that some very respectable people, including a bankruptcy judge and trustee, have stated they believe that I committed fraud and that our efforts were nothing but scams. Sadly, these conclusions are based solely upon the vigorous assertions of certain un-named parties, who backed them up with the flimsiest of evidence, primarily an inaccurate flow chart supposed to depict the companies we put together to create Seertech Corporation (the correct one is posted here).

What they conveniently never said to the trustee is that we had to take many of those steps in order to satisfy the requirements of a buy-out agreement we had with those folks.

After the fact, I was told by legal counsel that some of steps we took had many of the earmarks found in genuine fraud and "shell games", and thus the preliminary conclusions of the judge and trustee, when shown that surface sets of facts, were not unreasonable.

However, these respectable professionals apparently did not have the time or interest to look into the companies any further, even though we provided them with ample evidence (over nine boxes of corporate records) to prove that we had conducted legitimate business in a completely legal way.

Friends, fraud will be found in the books of a company. Enron, with the most creative accountants in the world, could not hide the fraud in their books.

It is helpful to note that this was a bankruptcy court and not a civil court. The judge and trustee were only concerned with trying to recover assets for the creditors, and not judge those claims based on the facts, as a civil court would be required to do. Thus they were allowed to be sloppy and unprofessional with impunity.

At one point, desperate to try and get some fairness in the picture, I went to the North Carolina State Bar to complain about the trustee's actions in this case. I only succeeded in getting him and the judge to slap me down all the harder.

They said that such an action on my part only confirmed what a bad guy I was. The judge ordered me to stop communicating with the State Bar, to withdraw my complaint and tell them I was no longer pursuing the matter.

In the end, the whole thing seemed like a case of “don't give me the facts, I've made up my mind.”  The trustee admits that he never looked at our books in depth. The judge relied upon the trustee. The trustee relied upon those un-named parties.

The court essentially based its very damaging opinion on hearsay and first impressions! Consequently, their conclusions are not as authoritative as their job-titles would lead you to believe. Preliminary conclusions, no matter how reasonable, can be wrong. In this case they are 100% wrong.

By the way, at the end of the bankruptcy, against our wishes and against the California corporate statutes, the bankruptcy judge gave the entire set of our corporate records to that group of accusers, who have been in possession of those records for more than a year now.

If anyone had a motivation to find discrepancies in our books, it is that group. Yet, since they received them, there has been absolute silence from them on the content of the books and records. Given their past behavior, if there was even a hint of impropriety in them, it is virtually certain that we all would have heard about it by now.

We still possess copies of most of the records and would be happy to let anyone examine what we have left. I understand though, that unless you are a financial professional, the books alone might not give you a full picture of what happened and how the money was spent.

For that reason, I have created a comprehensive timeline of events to give context to our activities, and to provide you with ample proof that we pursued legitimate business, efforts that unfortunately didn't succeed in the end. Our history entails many, many pages of information. In the interest of brevity, it is not posted here, but is available to anyone requesting it.

For those who might wonder, the history is definitely not meant to slander or disparage anyone else. We have obliterated all other names in the documents that we can show, enabling us to provide the evidence needed for full disclosure, without attempting to do harm to those individuals, unlike what has been done to us.

We simply want to show the steps we took to try and make the companies take flight. I believe we were very, very close to making it a success. In the history, we do speculate as to the real reason behind why things failed. However, if you wish to look at that material, we would ask you to make up your own mind about that.

Finally, I would like to address the multiple companies that were formed, and our reasons for creating them. At all times, I was motivated by the desire to stretch and protect the investment money. Any changes in company focus/form were not in an attempt to shuffle money and abandon previous investors. Quite the opposite!

When it became clear that the ideas and technology that folks originally invested in were no longer viable (in particular for investors in Rolltronics and VoltaFlex), new efforts were made with the goal of "making good" on those previous investments (which sometimes included creating legal vehicles to house them), and old investors were outright "given" equivalent stock in the new companies, at no additional cost, something for which we had no legal obligation, but followed our own sense of moral obligation. Rather than trying to abandon previous investors by starting new companies, we tried to bring everybody along in a bigger boat.

I hope some interested people will look into the material we can make available. We have attempted to put together the facts, not just the positive facts, but all the facts, so they can decide for themselves. I hope both the facts provided here and available upon request will help to clear my name, the good name of my colleagues, and bring some peace of mind to the wonderful people who trusted us with their investments. Thank you again.

Sincerely,

Michael