Hi Dan, we received a letter from BIA's attorney about your articles.
Mick Weinstein, the Editor-in-Chief has issued a clarification on our
editorial policy to the editors regarding this. For your convenience
I have copied and pasted what he sent to the editors below. To
clarify, you are still a contributing author - you have not been
removed from the site and we will still publish your articles. But
after reviewing your published articles, he felt it was best to remove
them. My apologies.

"When contributing SA authors make claims of outright criminal fraud
in the management of publicly-traded companies or fund providers, we
generally should not publish the article. In any given case, the
author's claims may or may not be accurate, but it's simply beyond the
capacity of our editorial team to research the claims in the manner
necessary before we could responsibly publish it. This, because the
very act of publishing such claims on a broadly-read and influential
financial website grants immediate legitimacy to the claims that may
not be justified. We therefore believe that claims of corporate fraud
are best handled by regulators and law enforcement officials first.

There are grey areas with our policy of distinguishing between these
two types of critique. We recently published a series of articles by
an author, Dan Plettner, who made claims of mismanagement at Boulder
Investment Advisers, LLC. As a stockholder in one of Boulder's CEFs,
Plettner argued aggressively that management was not acting in the
interest of shareholders and claimed that management's and
shareholders' interests were not appropriately aligned. Plettner also
made strong personal charges against BIA managment. At the time of
submission, our staff editor felt that Plettner's position did not
cross over into claims of outright fraud at BIA, and published his
articles.

We received a letter this week from BIA that encouraged us to revisit
the matter. Upon further review, we now believe that Plettner's
articles can reasonably be understood as making claims of criminal
fraud at BIA. We have decided, therefore, to remove the articles from
the site while Plettner pursues the matter through law enforcement
channels.

We generally prefer not to remove articles entirely from our archive.
Removal both wipes out the historical record of the article and breaks
any incoming links from around the web - both are bad practice for an
internet publisher. But in this case, the headlines themselves of
Plettner's articles made strong claims against BIA management that
could be reasonably understood as accusations of fraud. So we decided
to deviate from our normal practice of keeping disputed articles in
place - with text removed and an editor's note added - and remove the
article entirely.

As Seeking Alpha's stature and readership has grown, we receive more
and more article disputes from both our readership base and
corporations. (See our policy for disputing an article.) Most disputes
concern claims of fact on SA. We spend a great deal of time assessing
these disputes and working with authors to resolve them. We consider
this post-publication fact-checking a core activity of our editorial
team and a unique (and essential) aspect of the SA editorial model.

The Pletter/BIA case was unusual because it was less about claims of
fact and more about claims of fraud. It's the first time I can recall
we removed an article on this basis post-publication."