janice shell
2 weeks ago
I've been an Evil Basher for much longer than CRGP's been around. I just didn't begin to follow it till after the FINRA halt.
I started in 1997. At the time, I was living in Italy. I got online in 1996, and quickly discovered Silicon Investor. There, I made some friends. We were all following normal stocks that were trading on the Nasdaq or the NYSE. But one day, somebody came across a company called Cashco (which quickly became Crashco, naturally) that had an interesting product mix: Y2K remediation software and kitty litter.
So we decided to take a quick look. It was MUCH more interesting than we'd anticipated. The woman who ran it had previously been involved in the Dimples Diapers scandal in British Columbia. Her boyfriend, who was also the company's IR guy, had done prison time for solicitation to commit murder. And so on...
We never looked back.
janice shell
2 weeks ago
It hasn't gone to trial yet. I think it's still in the early stages.
Sheesh. This is from December 17 of last year. I really don't think there are any victims...
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-vns/case/united-states-v-andrew-left
Even the business about him working on the basis of tips from a hedge fund is stupid. Lots of shorts get tips from other market professionals.
The SEC brought a parallel case; there are a few things I haven't read, but not much has happened:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68980520/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-andrew-left/
If anyone's interested, this is the DOJ's indictment:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/media/1361671/dl?inline
And then last October, Ryan Choi, who worked with Left, and is not named in the criminal indictment, agreed to settle with the SEC. For what? See here:
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26164
And here:
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2024/comp26164.pdf
No need to go on, but Left did make disclosure. Did he guarantee he was right about what would happen with the stocks in question? Of course not. Was he usually right? I didn't follow all, or even most, of his plays in recent years, but, yes, he was usually right, at least about his short plays.
But all in all, Left should have been more careful about disclosure. And probably it was a big mistake for him to register as an investment adviser in California. He should have stock to mostly writing reports. I don't really think Twitter/X is all that good a venue for presenting complex DD.
janice shell
2 weeks ago
They're welcome to try. But it won't work.
It probably has something to do with--or they think it has something to do with--the DOJ investigation of short sellers that began not too long before COVID. It was in large part sparked by that idiot from Columbia, Joshua Mitts. If you've never heard of him, google his name.
But so far, there've only been one or two prosecutions. The second was filed almost a year ago; the defendant is Andrew Left. Pretty much all he's accused of is lying about when he closed short positions. Lying on TWITTER/X, for God's sake. Gee, I thought nobody ever did that. Left doesn't have any clients, so unless the DOJ has stuff that isn't in the court filings yet, it's a weak case.
Left has pled innocent.
janice shell
3 weeks ago
Ohhh. That doesn't actually have anything to do with MMTLP. The MMTLP stock was, of course, Issued by Meta Materials (MMAT). It was intended to be a placeholder for stock in a new private company, Next Bridge. MMTLP would be issued to MMAT shareholders as a placeholder for a preferred dividend in Next Bridge (which at that time didn't exist and hadn't been named), and then six months or so later, the MMAT stock would be exchanged for the Next Bridge divvy. Why was the creation of MMAT necessary? It wasn't. MMAT could, and should, have just issued Next Bridge stock immediately.
That was part of the scam, and the SEC described it in its lawsuit brought by SEC Enforcement against MMAT, John Brda, and George Palikaras:
The SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Brda and Palikaras planned and conducted the manipulative scheme that included, among other things, issuing a preferred stock dividend immediately before the merger. The complaint alleges that Brda and Palikaras told certain investors and consultants—and hinted via social media—that the dividend would force short sellers to exit their positions and trigger a “short squeeze” that would artificially raise the price of the company’s common stock. The SEC further alleges that Brda and Palikaras also misrepresented the company’s efforts to sell its oil and gas assets and distribute proceeds to preferred stockholders, giving investors a false impression of the value of the dividend. While investors held or bought the company’s common stock to receive the dividend, the complaint alleges, the company was cashing in by selling $137.5 million in an ATM offering at prices that the company, Brda, and Palikaras knew were temporarily inflated by their manipulative scheme. “We have two days,” the complaint alleges Brda told Palikaras after the first day of the ATM offering, “to take advantage of the squeeze...”
... A separate Commission investigation regarding subsequent events related to Meta Materials (MMTLP) remains ongoing. If you are an individual with information related to this investigation or any other related suspected fraud and you wish to contact the SEC staff, please submit a tip at SEC.gov.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26035
The complaint:
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2024/comp-pr2024-77.pdf
According to the SEC, "to accomplish his plan, Brda devised a series of transactions intended to create a short squeeze. Those transactions included a merger agreement between Torchlight and another company, along with a dividend—in the form of preferred stock issued to shareholders of record at closing—that Torchlight would not register or make available for immediate trading on any
exchange (“Preferred Dividend”). Shareholders who received the Preferred Dividend would purportedly be entitled to receive the net proceeds of the sale of Torchlight’s oil and gas assets. Brda believed, and intended to lead investors to believe, that the Preferred Dividend would force short sellers to exit their positions and trigger a short squeeze that would inflate the price of
Torchlight’s publicly traded stock."
As you'll see, Brda then went shopping for a company that would be suitable for use in his scheme. One with a CEO willing to play along. And he found MMAT and Palikaras. FINRA shut down MMTLP two days before the stock was scheduled to be cancelled. And that's what the MMTLP crazies are pissed off about, because there was no short squeeze.
MMAT, which was located in Nova Scotia, with other offices in British Columbia, hired a new CEO. A guy in California. MMAT was crazy, too. It'd been expanding without having the means to do so. The building that was its headquarters was huge. But eventually they had to declare bankruptcy. MMAT shareholders will get nothing, because as you see it's Chapter 7.
So to sum up, none of it has any relevance to Calissio.
Cologne9672
3 weeks ago
Proof is needed if CRGP isn’t documented as part of existing broker obligations, it won’t magically get included. The needs to be PROOF! that CRGP’s stock had been subject to naked short selling, synthetic shares, or settlement failures through omnibus accounts.
The real story here is that iCRGP was simply a penny stock that got diluted, delisted, and abandoned, there are most likely no obligations left to investigate.