Phil Cannella Lawsuit

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
Phil Cannella, in his drive to bring truth to the American retiree, has faced quite an attack from those who prefer that the truth is masked and those who are financially benefitting by keeping retirees ignorant. It is somewhat well known that the financial services industry as a whole is littered with unscrupulous people, those who seek to fleece the everyday investor and for their own personal gain. In fact, financial advisors are among the least trusted professionals in industry.

Yet in this vast ocean of despair there shines a beacon of light and that light is Phil Cannella who seeks to challenge the status quo and set an industry to rights. He formed up a media company, Retirement Media Inc., with the stated purpose of bringing “truth to the American retiree.” It was through this vehicle that he sought to enlighten the everyday investor of what is really going on on Wall Street.

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
Phil Cannella’s actions and more precisely his success brought him into the spotlight as he was gaining market share over those whose business dealings were less than forthright. We all know that every time there is a market crash someone or a small handful of someones make a lot of money off of the loss of the many. Take Goldman Sachs as an example who knew they were fleecing their investors to a tune of a billion dollars not long before the stock market collapse of 2007/2008.

Phil Cannella has not only exposed these illicit campaigns, but the success of his Crash Proof Retirement™ system has seen him take hundreds of millions of dollars of investor’s funds out of the securities industry and into the safe harbor of the insurance industry. This brought upon him the ill will of his competitors who were thriving off of the ignorance of the everyday investor and these competitors sought to take Phil out.

Instead of notching up their own marketing skills and improving their services to their own clients, these competitors utilized anti-competitive practices in order to gain marketing share.

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
“Anticompetitive practices refer to a wide range of business practices in which a firm or group of firms may engage in order to restrict inter-firm competition to maintain or increase their relative market position and profits without necessarily providing goods and services at a lower cost or of higher quality.”

“The essence of competition entails attempts by firm(s) to gain advantage over rivals. However, the boundary of acceptable business practices may be crossed if firms contrive to artificially limit competition by not building so much on their advantages but on exploiting their market position to the disadvantage or detriment of competitors, customers and suppliers such that higher prices, reduced output, less consumer choice, loss of economic efficiency and misallocation of resources (or combinations thereof) are likely to result.”

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
“Which types of business practices are likely to be construed as being anticompetitive and, if that, as violating competition law, will vary by jurisdiction and on a case by case basis. Certain practices may be viewed as per se illegal while others may be subject to rule of reason.” http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=3145

The illegal business practices this small handful of competitors engaged in was the use of defamation, libel and slander in order to ruin Phil Cannella’s reputation in the eyes of his clients, prospects, vendors and even employees. What these people did is carefully orchestrate an online defamation campaign through a blog where they posted all manner of scandalous statements about Phil Cannella regardless of its truth. Because these people chose the Internet as the medium to convey their lies, it hit right at the heartbeat of the company. Consumers today use the Internet to conduct research on companies they are looking at doing business with or services they are considering using.

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
Hence, when a consumer conducted a search against Phil Cannella’s name all manner of defamatory material was found and this served to drive potential prospects away in droves. These are types of anticompetitive practices that are illegal. They were attempting to increase their own market share by illegally destroying Phil Cannella’s.

What made the defamation campaign so insidious is that the perpetrators carefully kept their identities masked by using fictitious screen names. Furthermore, not only did they use fictitious screen names but the same individuals used multiple different screen names in order to give the appearance that hundreds if not thousands of disgruntled consumers were out there when in fact it all boiled down to a handful of disgruntled competitors who were losing their pants due to their own inability to succeed in the market place.

Phil Cannella Lawsuit:
In order to right this wrong, Phil Cannella filed a lawsuit in federal court in the hopes of not only identifying those behind the attack but also putting an end to the campaign. In a landmark decision in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the presiding judge ruled in favor of Phil Cannella, ordering that the defamatory material be removed from the Internet and furthermore the authors were permanently enjoined from making defamatory remarks.

It was a long road and a tough road but in the end truth prevailed and Phil Cannella saw his legal triumph through.