IBT Media Fires Back: IBT 'rightful and legal' Newsweek Owner, States Lawyer; Dev Pragad as Supposed Owner a 'fiction,' 'facade'

On Friday IBT Media fired back via a statement from its lawyer against dual attempts by Newsweek CEO Pragad to obfuscate his lack of ownership interests in the company by once again unethically weaponizing the newsroom and through a "meritless" legal filing that mixes religion and shareholder rights.

Dev Pragad is not a shareholder of Newsweek

IBT Media attorney Michael C. Hefter of Hogan Lovells stated Friday that a new Newsweek lawsuit's claims are "meritless." Hogan Lovells is a top ten law firm globally by revenue.

Hefter explained in a statement that IBT Media is the "rightful and legal" owner of Newsweek. Dev Pragad "supposedly" transferring the ownership is a "facade," and Pragad "engineered... a fiction" to support his baseless ownership claims, the attorney said this week to media covering the IBT ownership of Newsweek.

Contrary to Pragad's claim to own shares of Newsweek, LLC., the financial obligations written on the sales contract between Newsweek Media Holdings and IBT Media, Inc. remain unfulfilled to the present day, according to an IBT Media lawsuit filed on June 30, 2022.

The lawsuit indicates that Pragad owns no shares of Newsweek

Instead of addressing his failure to adhere to his contractual obligation to purchase Newsweek shares which would have required substantial payments, Pragad continuously paid nothing while touting himself as the man who "saved the news." With no payments made, he never consummated the supposed contract to purchase Newsweek--as HNGN previously reported.

The derivative lawsuit filed by Pragad on Friday further misuses his position at Newsweek Media Holding by suing IBT Media and other parties without the consent of its shareholder, Johnathan Davis. Brazen misrepresentation of his status and misappropriation of company funds for personal gain are typical of Pragad's two-faced character, court documents reveal. A court ruling in IBT favor will not only force Pragad to acknowledge the true ownership of Newsweek as IBT Media, thus bursting Pragad's "engineered... fiction," but will also remove him from the company completely.

Why does Pragad talk about religion in a legal filing?

In the lawsuit, Hogan Lovells represents that in early 2022, "Pragad began to take aggressive steps" to protect his ownership facade "for which he had not paid a single dollar."

In addition to weaponizing the newsroom in a series of articles after telling opponents he would mow them down like "puppies before a machine gun," as HNGN has previously reported, on July 7 Pragad lashed out in a new, additional step, suing Johnathan Davis and several parties associated with Davis.

Pragad's lawsuit includes religious claims that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal issues of his ownership "facade," according to IBT Media lawyers, who dismissed the lawsuit as "meritless" on July 8. The "troubling... narrative" Pragad presents by mixing religious matters with legal issues seem to obfuscate the reality Pragad can't escape from: the truth that he owns no Newsweek shares.

Pragad not a "savior of the news"

In Pragad's desperation play to smokescreen the public eye from his ownership woes, the Newsweek suit claims that money is owed to Newsweek by IBT Media. Meanwhile, IBT Media says under Pragad, the companies acted as one, and that Newsweek owes IBT Media "damages" for Pragad's "ill-gotten gains" from his ongoing deception.

Pragad's claim plays into his recent promotion of himself as the "savior of the news" to which IBT is indebted. However, further research indicates Pragad's view of himself as the "architect" of Newsweek's success is "fiction," according to IBT lawyers.

For example, Pragad's lawsuit accuses owner IBT Media of mismanagement of Newsweek. But Newsweek was a better publication under IBT Media than it is now under Pragad's management, according to the lawsuit.

In 2018, when the Newsweek offices were expiring, Pragad moved Newsweek into the IBT Media offices, thus IBT Media was the one that saved Newsweek from becoming a homeless magazine. Then in 2021, Pragad moved Newsweek out of IBT Media's offices to escape responsibility for the rent, according to a landlord lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed by plaintiff Broad Financial Center LLC, alleges that with Pragad at the helm, Newsweek "stripped IBT of its valuable assets in a wrongful attempt to insulate themselves from the obligations" of paying rent. Further, the claim asserts Newsweek did this to "mislead, harm, and thwart" creditors. The rent lawsuit puts damages northward of $1.1 million.

It was at this time, when the company Pragad managed ran away from its rent responsibility, that Pragad started to spin his "fiction" of being an owner and "savior" of the company.

Etienne Uzac and Johnathan Davis, the purchasers of Newsweek in 2013 through IBT Media, are the real owners of Newsweek, the lawsuit states. This duo built the executive team, many of whom Pragad poached from IBT Media and brought to Newsweek while the companies operated as one under Pragad's management, the lawsuit states. The Uzac and Davis team rebuilt the newsroom and business team from scratch after the previous owner had shut down the print edition entirely. The two successfully restored the print edition of Newsweek, developed most of the international network of Newsweek, and set up Newsweek's distribution network.

Where was Pragad when all of this took place? Pragad was far away in London, and had nothing to do with the successful setting up of Newsweek, instead only using his "duplicity" as a master of stealing credit for other people's work, the lawsuit indicates.

Pragad threatened to destroy enemies like "puppies before a machine gun"

When Pragad doesn't get his way, things get ugly, according to HNGN sources. Though "the image that Dev Pragad has cultivated" in the public eye remained pristine, Pragad showed another side, hidden except to his enemies, according to the filing. Early in 2022, when Pragad's aggression escalated, he began to voice his threats against the shareholder of Newsweek, Johnathan Davis, threatening to leverage Newsweek's reporters in a "nuclear bomb" against Davis if he did not give Pragad the company, as HNGN has previously reported.

In a text message exchange that this correspondent has seen, an anonymous source shared a recent conversation with Pragad, in which the Newsweek CEO told a former friend that he is "inseparable from Newsweek" and he will "detonate a nuclear bomb and kill [Davis and his associates]." He further bragged that he has "a lot of lawyers," and that his adversaries would be like "puppies in front of a machine gun" because "I am a PhD."

Pragad continued with the "nuclear bomb" threats a few days later: "This is nuclear bomb [sic]. Don't engage if you don't know how to deal with a nuclear bomb. If it goes off, it will nuke everyone. And it's the end. I don't want that to happen and for this to happen unintentionally coz some silly people who don't know what they are doing start tinkering. There is nothing they can do. It will just blow up on their face if they try to do anything. This may trigger a congressional investigation in Olivet. I'm so close to congress and senators and they love what I'm doing at Newsweek. They are all watching so closely along with world leaders."

Sweeping all media and business ethics aside, Pragad's threats have been fulfilled through his publishing of a series of Newsweek hit pieces, repeatedly weaponizing the Newsweek newsroom against his declared enemies, as HNGN has previously reported.

The latest in Newsweek's growing list of hatchet-job articles was posted July 8 on the Newsweek homepage--in it, Pragad unashamedly bashes his enemies once again, further muddling unrelated religious issues with his ownership calamities.

Pragad cheating Newsweek workers and the public

Dev Pragad claims that government officials and world leaders "love" what he's doing at Newsweek, but these officials may only know Pragrad's carefully groomed external image. Yet as IBT fires back, a darker side of Pragad is being revealed--through "duplicity," apparently cheating both Newsweek workers and the public at large, Pragad no longer appears to be the "savior" of the news. The IBT Media lawsuit exposes him, instead, as simply a fraudster.