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The Trucial States issues were generated by a shyster who hawked them as investments.
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So, was The Kenmore Stamp Company taken in by that shyster or was it the actual shyster itself???
It is very difficult to answer the question when people are being so vague about the alleged 'shyster'. There are at least 6 possible candidates for this title (all of them definitely dead, so I am not sure why we are puzzyfooting around it). And it is probably true to say that no single one of them was solely responsible for the philatelic mess that emerged in the Trucial States and neighbouring states of Qatar and Oman.
1) Bruce Conde, a maverick, mercenary and Walter Mitty character, who was postal advisor to the Imamate of Oman and to Sharjah. He was really the first person to persuade rulers in the area that they could screw money out of stamp collectors, but seems to have tried to keep it within bounds.
2) Finbar Kenney (or Kenny), managing director of the American company Stolow. Stolow had earlier been responsible for many of the South Moluccas issues and were, at the time under discussion, involved in some murky stamp dealings in Haiti. Kenney himself was convicted of paying sweeteners to the Cook Islands government to obtain stamp contracts. Faced with 10 years or a $1M fine, he paid the fine. Who said there is no money in stamps? He was certainly involved in contracts in Fujeirah and Umm al Qiwain.
3) Michel Stephan, a Lebanese who more or less ran Baroody Stamps of Beirut. He was known to trade in forged overprints and create 'unofficial' covers. He had contracts in several of the Trucial states. He retained a large stock, but this stock was not released onto the market until recently (by Tony El-Helou, definitely not by Kenmore.)
4) Ezzet Mosden, a shadowy figure who was Baroody's agent in America and also believed to be involved in forging covers.
5) Martin Sellinger was a crony of Kenney, but also appears to have been involved with Middle East Stamps SAL who held contracts with Sharjah and Ajman. He was associated at different times with Fouad Antoun, George Hage and Jacques Anhoury. He ended up with a vast stock of material from the area: to be precise 713 crates full, with a total weight of over 30 tons. He sold them to a company called Wall Street Ventures, run by a Middle East banker, two scientologists and John Reznikoff, who ran the University Stamp Company. (Reznikoff is still alive so I will word this carefully.) They used the stamps as collateral on the Canadian stock market, but unfortunately recorded the catalogue value as the likely retail value! As soon as someone pointed out that noone would be stupid enough to buy vast numbers of duplicate dunes for more than a tiny fraction of catalogue, the whole thing collapsed. Sellinger bought the stamps back at the price for which he had sold them. He died in 2005 and I have no idea what has happened to them.
6) Clive Feigenbaum, expelled from the PTS and tried on at least two occasions for producing fraudulent stamps, was involved in the Imamate of Oman (following Conde), and subsequently Dhufar. But he also ran Format International who had printing contracts for stamps of Ajman and Ras al Khaima.
To return to the question: I do not know of any connection between Kenmore and any of the above. But if jobi1 is prepared to tell me, by PM email if necessary, which he was referring to, I'll see if I can turn up an answer.
[I apologising for using the nonsense word puzzyfooting, but the automatic censor on this site regards the real word as obscene!!]
Posted 03/02/2013 2:15 pm
