Lawrence Fossi was hiding his identity. Perhaps because he was actually lying about verifiable facts; when he got caught lying about verifiable facts at Seeking Alpha, and called on it, he would try to ban the commenters who caught him. Or perhaps simply because he wanted to hide his oil connections. He hid his identity for malicious reasons.
I was one of the commenters on this articles who had their posts/comments deleted on SeekingAlpha. The reasons given for deleting my posts were quite flimsy - claiming that my comment was not related to the article, claiming I had included names of authors, claiming my comment was a personal attack etc. None of these were true, my comments were always polite and asking for explanation or refuting some information in the article. At one point, SeekingAlpha email informing me that my comment was deleted also stated that my account would be banned if I continued in this manner. So, I stopped reading seekingapha or posting for a long time.
I am glad he has been outed, he deserved it. I hope SeekingAlpha gets under pressure to apologize as well, since clearly they have been posting these articles with no regard for accuracy or truth. Shame on them.