BACK in January 2005, somebody using the name Rahodeb set about attacking Wild Oats Markets, an organic supermarket chain, on a Yahoo stock-market forum.

Rahodeb poured scorn on the idea that Wild Oats would soon be snapped up by Whole Foods Market, its larger rival, which is now looking to expand in the UK and Ireland. Instead, the mystery poster speculated Wild Oats would soon slip on an organic banana skin and end up in bankruptcy.

Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing . . . Oats has no value and no future”, wrote Rahodeb.

Stock-market chat forums are full of opinions just as juicy as Rahodeb’s – and often as ill-informed. At the time of the postings, Wild Oats was worth $8 a share. Earlier this year, Whole Foods Market agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565m, or $18.50 a share.

However, Rahodeb was outed last week as none other than John Mackey, founder and chief executive of Whole Foods.

Rahodeb is an anagram of Deborah, the name of Mackey’s wife. The company has confirmed that for about eight years Mackey used the moniker to cheer Whole Foods’ financial results and riddicule Wild Oats.

Mackey’s online alter ego came to light in a document made public last Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and is the latest revelation in its lawsuit seeking to block the Wild Oats takeover on antitrust grounds.

After examining 20m documents the FTC has found plenty of comments, mainly from Mackey, to embarrass the company. According to an FTC complaint, Mackey told Whole Foods’ board of directors that “by buying [Wild Oats] we will . . . avoid nasty price wars”, “eliminate” a rival and block “forever, or almost forever” the possibility of another grocer buying a rival to compete with Whole Foods.

But a cursory look at the facts shows the FTC doesn’t have much of a case.

Of course, Whole Foods and Wild Oats compete for the same market, but so did 18 other retailers that Whole Foods has been allowed to buy before Wild Oats. The two also face growing competition from far larger rivals including Wal-Mart and Safeway, which are beefing up their organic food ranges, and Tesco, which is launching a new chain, Fresh & Easy, in America.

The FTC has approved a large number of mergers that would seem to be far more anticompetitive than a merger of Whole Foods and Wild Oats, which, when combined, would represent less than 1% of the nation’s groceries. Even in the narrower category of natural and organic foods, their combined market share is just 15%.

Challenges to mergers have fallen to a 20-year low under the Bush administration, says a survey by Georgetown University Law Center. So why does the FTC seem so eager to prevent the merger? It would seem someone has been doing some pretty stiff lobbying in Washington.

But Mackey, a vegan libertarian, isn’t doing much to curry favour. Shortly after a judge made public the full FTC complaint, Mackey posted a 14,000-word blog entry on Whole Foods’ website accusing the FTC of being “adversarial and arrogant”.

Bring back Rahodeb, all is forgiven.

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