By Fabian Dawson
Mata Press Service

The holy month of Ramadan is a time for Muslims to reflect on their faith in God and their trust in humanity.
In the summer of 2011, when Ramadan was being observed in Turkey, Vancouver entrepreneur, Altaf Nazerali, was chastising himself for neglecting to spend more time cherishing these values, after a hectic bout of investor meetings in Istanbul.
“I was hoping for some quiet time to reflect in the waiting lounge, when the call came,” said Nazerali.
By the time the call ended, Nazerali’s belief in both God and humanity were shaken.
The voice on the other end had berated him for not coming clean about his past, which apparently included connections with narco-traffickers, terrorists and Mafia organisations.
The phone call ended abruptly indicating that the proposed deal with one of Turkey’s top industrialists was dead.
“Google yourself,” said the voice, before hanging up.
At 30,000 feet, a confused and shocked Nazerali was trying to figure out what why he was being punished, what he did to deserve this and who were his accusers.
During transit enroute to British Columbia, the full force of the fake articles on the Internet, horrified him.
By the time he got to his home in Vancouver’s North Shore Mountains, the phone had rung several times as business associates called him with unflattering questions.
It was the beginning of Nazerali’s seven-year battle to combat a ruthless campaign of lies orchestrated by American conspiracy theorist, Patrick M. Byrne, and Mark Mitchell, his employee with dubious journalistic credentials.

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Born in Kenya, after his grandparents migrated from India, Nazerali was raised in an environment which preferred conversation and consultation to conflict and conflagration.
Granted an MBA from Columbia University at age 20, the serial entrepreneur, who is now based in Vancouver, has financed numerous companies focused primarily on natural resources, software, telecommunications and emerging technologies located in Japan, North America and Europe.
He has also led of a number of large scale communications and engineering projects throughout Africa and the Middle East and commodity-based financing enterprises.
A firm believer in the philosophy of the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the world’s Ismaili community, Nazerali’s many acts of philanthropy, include a full-scale medical facility attached to the Aga Khan University - Pakistan’s leading medical Institution.
Never one to forget his roots, Nazerali is also a patron of a boarding school for vocational training of girls in Bhuj, India from where his family originated.
It was in the spirit of consultation to correct a wrong that Nazerali began trying to find out who was behind a number of fake articles about him on a website called deepcapture.com.
The articles were written by Mark Mitchell, a self-styled investigative journalist who was unceremoniously dumped by the Columbia Journalism Review, and published on a website owned by Patrick M. Byrne, who was also the editor and owner.
The articles contained sensational allegations that Nazerali obtained his start as an arms dealer to the mujahedeen, that he has been a Pakistani intelligence asset, that he served as an important financial advisor to the Iranian regime, that he was an important figure in a massive criminal enterprise in the 1970s and 1980s, that he did business with such unsavoury organizations as the Italian mafia, the Russian mafia and Colombian drug cartels, and that he has controlled organizations that have manipulated U.S. markets from their base in the Netherlands.
The articles also linked Nazerali to attempts to sell enriched uranium to Al-Qaeda, to Russian intelligence operators and arms dealers, to the godfather of the Kremlin, various mafia organizations in Italy and “an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers”.
“I was horrified reading this, so were my family, friends and business associates,” Nazerali told the South Asian Post.
On September 6, 2011, Nazerali reached out to Mitchell via email to point out some of the falsehoods stating “in the interest of setting the record straight, and to give you the opportunity to re-examine your sources for the various events you relate, I would like to speak to you.”
Mitchell replied the next day, saying he was agreeable to speak with Nazerali and would like to meet with him.
In part Mitchell wrote:
“Please note, though, that I mentioned in the story that the descriptions of the meetings (Aruba, Cala di Volpe), were composites of multiple meetings, with true locations disguised to hide the identity of sources. So whether you traveled to those places is not necessarily important.
In any case, nothing in the story is written in stone, so if I find that there are errors, I will be happy to make revisions. If there is other verifiable information that you can direct me to, and that information makes the story better, I might consider rewriting it altogether.
Indeed, I might do so anyway, not because I think the facts are wrong (though, again, if there are factual errors, I will, in any case, correct them), but because in the time since I wrote that story, I have undergone a rather major transformation of my worldview. That is, the facts being what they are, my opinions about them have changed.”
Three days later, Nazerali called Mitchell and recorded the conversation.
In a following email, Mitchell offered to remove Nazerali’s name from his articles saying “I do not reveal the names of my sources, so if you were to become a source, I would be obliged to remove all previous mentions of your name on DeepCapture.
Like I said, some facts are more interesting than others, and I’d gladly take your name out of the story altogether in exchange for having you as a source. Let me know what you think…As I say, I’ll consider removing your name from the story entirely if it means having you as a quality source of information.”
Nazerali said he was outraged by this offer.
“Mitchell's offer to recruit me as a source was coupled with a threat that if I did not agree, the false and defamatory words would remain on the website,” said Nazerali.
No part of the website was changed in substance as a result of the email exchanges and the telephone conversation.
Unable to correct or remove the falsehoods about him on the website, Nazerali filed suit against Mitchell and Byrne, the following month.
Byrne for his part wrote on his blog that Nazerali was attempting to silence DeepCapture.com.
Despite boasting that “he was willing to go a few rounds” with Nazerali, Byrne did not appear in court.
Instead, he sent Vancouver lawyer Roger McConchie to argue that the Canadian courts can’t do anything about these writings because it has no jurisdiction on the matter.
It was a failed attempt to run for the border.

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Patrick M. Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, claims to have a photographic memory.
But when total recall doesn’t fit his narrative, the controversial Utah-based tycoon resorts to making things up, as recent Canadian court rulings against him show.
His targets include Wall Street firms, brokers, research outfits and journalists who dare say anything negative about him or Overstock.com, which specialises in liquidating excess inventory through the Internet. It now claims to be a leader in blockchain and cryptocurrencies – technologies which rely on trust and security
However, why he used his considerable resources to target Nazerali, is still shrouded in mystery.
“That is still unclear to me,” said Nazerali.
“But what the lies did was cause me and my family considerable pain, devastate my business and disturb my health…It’s the cruelest form of undeserved punishment one human could inflict on another,” said Nazerali.
“ Falsehoods published on the Internet can persist forever thanks to search engines.”
This month, seven years later, almost to the day since the fake news appeared on Deepcature.com, Canada’s top court said it did not want to hear anything more from Byrne, forcing him to pay over $1 million for tarnishing the reputation of Nazerali.
The recent Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling was the final avenue of appeal for Byrne, who was challenging the original scathing 2016 verdict by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Affleck.
Justice Affleck in his 102-page ruling said: "Mitchell, Byrne and Deep Capture LLC engaged in a calculated and ruthless campaign to inflict as much damage on Mr. Nazerali's reputation as they could achieve.”
"It is clear on the evidence that their intention was to conduct a vendetta in which the truth about Mr. Nazerali himself was of no consequence." Affleck slammed Mitchell and Byrne for demonstrating "an indecent and pitiless desire to wound."
Justice Affleck went on to say, "not only are the defamatory words pleaded by the plaintiff damaging to his reputation, these defendants, instead of choosing to tone down their extravagant language once they were sued, chose to pile on the abuse with a narrative of multiple allegations of serious misconduct."
The penalties against Byrne reflect the callousness and utter disregard for the truth by the defendants, said Dan Burnett, Canada’s leading lawyer in the areas of freedom of expression and media law, who represented Nazerali.
“They battled every which way to defend their lies,” said Burnett, who systematically destroyed the arguments by Byrne’s lawyer, McConchie, a veteran media lawyer.
In addition to failing to have the case tossed over jurisdictional rights, McConchie pleaded his client’s right to free speech and that the lies were essentially “responsible communication”.
The judge ruled the defence’s argument about free speech was irrelevant and the “responsible communication” theory was devoid of merit.
McConchie told local media that the recent Supreme Court of Canada’s refusal to hear the appeal means that some issues he had hoped to raise about the case won’t be.
“They weaponised the internet and used it as a playground for their fantasies to do serious harm to my client and the courts in Canada have said they will treat fake news on the internet like they treat libel in traditional media,” said Burnett.
“The damages granted my client speaks volumes to that issue and there is really nothing left to argue,” added Burnett.

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In an era where fake news is undermining the integrity of journalists everywhere, especially in Donald Trump’s America, the judgement stands as the largest ever defamation award in British Columbia and one of the largest in Canadian legal history.
“This is a lesson that fake news has real consequences in Canada,” said Harbinder Singh, a Vancouver-based newspaper publisher, who has been recognised locally and internationally as an innovator in the ethnic press.
“Fake news threatens Canada’s democratic institutions at a time when traditional news outlets are facing cutbacks…this case clearly illustrates the fake news problem,” he said, adding Canada’s media outlets need to do more to publicly identify fake news especially on social media channels.
Research by the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business found that businessmen and
companies that spread fake news against their competitors ultimately experience the brunt of negative publicity and reputational damage.
“It’s a lesson we all learned in kindergarten: don’t tell a lie,” said the study’s co-author Ho Kim, assistant professor of digital and social media marketing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis
“It’s not surprising, but a lot of people spread fake news. When it’s uncovered as fake news, it brings lasting reputational damage for the offender,” he said in a statement.
But Byrne, who has evolved from e-retailer to cryptocurrency prophet, seems unperturbed by this.
His American media darling status, which he has developed with threats and promises, doesn’t seem to have been impacted by the Canadian courts labelling him a fake-newsmonger.
Wired has heralded him as a "Bitcoin messiah" in an industry where trust underpins all transactions and more recently he headlined a conference in San Francisco on the blockchain industry.
There is no mention in the financial media covering Byrne’s blockchain boasts about the fake news he peddled about Nazerali.
Maybe the reason for that lies in a New York Times column by Joe Nocera that described Byrne as a "menace, saying "he bullies and taunts and goads the small handful of reporters who dare to write about Overstock, making it clear that there will be a price to be paid for tackling the company or its chief executive."
“It’s ironic. Byrne is more like the pioneer of fake news,” said Gary Weiss, the author of Wall Street Versus America: A Muckraking Look at the Thieves, Fakers, and Charlatans Who Are Ripping You Off.
“This is the most contemporary and important ruling involving fake news but it is not getting any coverage in America,” said Weiss.
Veteran Canadian journalist, Stewart Muir, said Nazerali’s defamation award may give encouragement to other businesses and industries that are the subject of routine "fake news" attacks from critics and competitors.
"In Canada, we are seeing growing discontent with false claims made to the public about trade goods and commodities that the country is heavily reliant on," said Muir, head of the Vancouver-based think tank Resource Works.
"In the end, it is ordinary Canadians who suffer most when these dishonest tactics are used. Maybe Mr. Nazerali's success will embolden others who have been unfairly targeted."
As Nazerali consigns this sordid saga to a bad period in his life, he has these words of caution; If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.”