Bill Bonner is not happy.

The Agora founder expected praise from the city of Baltimore after decades of investment in Mount Vernon. Instead, he got a lawsuit.

“After forty-and-some years of honest obscurity, toiling away in the rattier precincts of Baltimore, the city had at last deigned to notice us,” Bonner wrote in a two-page letter to The Banner Wednesday. “But hold on. It is not applauding. It is not thanking. It is suing us — for alleged ‘predatory’ marketing."

Bonner’s flagship publishing company, Agora, and its many affiliates, are under new legal scrutiny after the city’s Law Department filed a consumer protection lawsuit against them in Baltimore City Circuit Court this week. The suit claims the companies “target older consumers with exploitative business practices,” like making misleading claims about the efficacy of health supplements and promising “lifetime” newsletter subscriptions that don’t actually last.

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Bonner says his companies are simply “perched out at the far rim of permissible opinion,” marketing ideas that have not yet been accepted by the mainstream. He credits The Agora Companies with predicting the 2008 housing crisis; with publishing Robert Atkins, the creator of the Atkins Diet, when no one else took him seriously; and with advising readers about companies like Amazon and Nvidia before they became giants.

The ideas don’t always pan out, Bonner acknowledged, so the company has protected itself and its customers by refunding money, within reason, “to anyone who cares to ask.”

Bonner and his wife have also been major benefactors in the struggling Mount Vernon neighborhood, buying and fixing up historic mansions that otherwise might have sat vacant or been razed. Bonner wrote that he resisted calls to move his companies to Baltimore County over the years, paid millions in taxes and employed city residents.

“Have the schools improved, as we were promised? Are the streets any safer? Is there less trash in the gutters?” he asked. “We want a refund.”