To be honest they have sensationalized this story to the point that a movie could be made out of it, in the end I think they are pathological liars, I have seen it in their moves with fraudulent accounting and with the promotion of IB stock by paying writers to hype the stock to investors.
Brisco was forced to sell the company by Bill Gross who wanted out, and they made the deal just as the stock was crashing in the marketplace, in other words Brisco is hanging on by a thread and if the current buyer pulls out, Gross and Brisco will lose untold millions.
Look at how the stock was trading just days before the IB merger announcement, it was crashing.
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=inet&sid=0&o_symb=inet
This is just one of the stories that Brisco paid to have put out when the stock was trading under 7 bucks right after the vB fiasco broke out.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/195249-the-number-one-internet-stock-you-ve-never-heard-of