Mystery surrounds firm touting 'inertialess drive'

An inventor who raised $6.8 million from Bay investors before shifting to Switzerland is planning to start a "green tech power generation mass production plant" at Mount Maunganui.
Inertialess Drive ZPE (2010) Ltd has advertised for 21 staff needed to bring Ken Pedlar's ideas to a mass market.
Mr Pedlar has for years touted a prototype micro-hydro generator using his "inertialess" rotor which runs off flowing water.
Inertia technologies have long been associated with science fiction, particularly in the realm of acceleration to faster-than-light speeds.
Efforts by the Bay of Plenty Times to discuss the plans with Mr Pedlar, the company director, were unsuccessful.
It included going to the company's registered office at 580 Maunganui Rd.
The owner of the house, who asked not to be named, said he never authorised his house to be used as the registered office. He said Mr Pedlar's aunty lived in the house and that Mr Pedlar's son sometimes called around to pick up his father's mail.
"I don't know where he is - he could live on the Moon for all I know."
Inertialess Drive ZPE is the latest in a series of companies registered by Mr Pedlar since 1994.
They were all based around his research into inertialess-drive technologies.
His first company was struck off in 1996 for failing to provide an annual return. Two subsequent companies were also struck off.
The latest company, registered in August last year, showed Moananui Michael Ken Pedlar as the sole director and shareholder of 30 million shares.
Its advertisement in a recent Bay of Plenty Times asked applicants to submit a one-page handwritten CV. The staff list includes two mechanical engineers, two electrical engineers, four product designers and two carbon-fibre fabricators.
Employment would start in April-May next year.
Mr Pedlar appears to have found substantial financial backing for his enterprise, despite the Securities Commission on February 4 issuing a warning to investors that Inertialess Drive ZPE's share offer was illegal.
The commission banned the document offering shares in the company, saying the offer advertised last December in the Bay of Plenty Times was illegal because no prospectus had been registered and there was no investment statement.
It was Mr Pedlar's third brush with Crown commercial law enforcement agencies.
The commission said advertising for shares in Inertialess Drive Technologies was banned in 1998 because there was no registered prospectus.
In 2000, advertising for shares in Inertialess Drive Corporation (IDC) was banned for the same reason.
The advertisements in the Bay of Plenty Times were targeted at former shareholders of these companies.
IDC was put into liquidation in 2001. The Official Assignee's final report of April, 2004 said no assets were realised and no proceeds were available for distribution to creditors.
Mr Pedlar moved to Switzerland following a shareholders' meeting in Tauranga on February 24, 2000. By the time the company was put into liquidation, he had left behind more than 1200 shareholders, most of who lived in the Western Bay of Plenty.
The share register recorded that they paid more than $6.8 million to Mr Pedlar for shares in the company from October 1998 to March 2000.
In the mid 1990s Mr Pedlar applied for funding from the Bay of Plenty Business Development Board, however the board was unable to assess the technical aspects of the technology and sought his consent to obtain independent technical feedback.
Former board manager Grant Nordick said Mr Pedlar declined to give consent and so no funding was approved.
Lindsay Richards, formerly of solar heating company Sola 60, visited the company's Hull Rd premises about 11 years ago where he saw the prototype in action on a kitchen table, with wires coming off powering light bulbs.
Water was being pumped under high pressure into the device and Mr Richards immediately wondered how much energy was going in via the water pump to produce the energy needed to light the bulbs.
He said it looked to him like a very inefficient micro-hydro device. As for whether it was inertialess, Richards said it looked to him like the water was driving a partially spherical ball which he assumed contained windings with a magnet in the middle to produce an alternating current.
Mr Richards said he was struck by how the factory looked like the set of a B-grade movie, with people in white overalls milling around like extras, with nothing really happening.
He asked Mr Pedlar how business was going and was told that the company was working with General Motors on a deal worth billions of dollars.
An unnamed company secretary for Inertialess Drive ZPE responded by email to the Bay of Plenty Times that Mr Pedlar was declining all media requests for interviews, saying the media had been negatively biased in their reporting and demonstrated a lack of research.
"There never has been any advertising for the sale of shares inside New Zealand."
WHAT ARE THE CLAIMS
The core technology is a bearing-free rotor that simultaneously rotates in two planes at 90 degrees to each other. The rotation is centripetal. There is no centrifugal aspect and the mass does not gain inertia when spun.
It can achieve extremely high revolutions and be easily moved about while remaining stable and without the danger of the rotor disintegrating, which normally happens under centrifugal stress.
What skeptics say about the idea
If an object has no inertia, by definition it has no mass and therefore can have no momentum.