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Article: Vitol to pay $95.7 million to settle fraud, market manipulation charges

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Vitol to pay $95.7 million to settle fraud, market manipulation charges

Reuters Staff, 04 December 2020

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Energy and commodities trading firm Vitol Inc has agreed to pay $95.7 million to settle charges of corruption-based fraud and attempted market manipulation, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday.

Houston-based Vitol did not admit or deny the charges, but agreed to pay the civil penalties related to making bribes and offering kickbacks to employees of certain state-owned entities in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico in exchange for “preferential treatment and access to trades,” the regulator said.

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Article: Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

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Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

ACCESSWIRE, 03 December 2020

Berman Tabacco, a national law firm representing investors, is investigating potential violations of the federal securities laws by OrthoPediatrics Corp. (“OrthoPediatrics” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ:KIDS) and its officers and directors. OrthoPediatrics is a medical device company based in Warsaw, Indiana. The Company designs, develops, and commercializes orthopedic implants and instruments for children with orthopedic conditions. On December 2, 2020, Culper Research issued a report asserting that it believed that OrthoPediatrics “overstated revenues.” On this news, the Company’s common shares were trading down by as much as 13% on heavy volume.
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Article: Why Nano-X Imaging Stock Continues to Surge

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Why Nano-X Imaging Stock Continues to Surge

Rich Smith, 02 December 2020

Shares of Nano-X Imaging (NASDAQ: NNOX), the Israeli X-ray machine maker with the novel business idea of giving its products away for free (and then taking a cut of the revenue when doctors use the machines to take X-rays), is back in investors’ favor again. Over the past 10 days, shares of Nano-X have surged 79% — including a big 7% jump today as of 2:20 p.m. EST.

Why is Nano-X doing so well today? To learn the answer, you first have to go back in time a couple of months to mid-September, when Citron Research published a report branding Nano-X as “Theranos 2.0” and a company that not only “has never published any data showing their machine’s images compared to images from a standard CT scanner,” but has actually never even showed investors that it has a machine at all.

These and similar accusations from the short-seller devastated Nano-X’s stock over the summer, but on Thursday starting at 11:30 a.m. EST, Nano-X will attempt to refute all of the above by hosting “a live demonstration that will showcase the Nanox digital x-ray source tube and a range of 2D and 3D imaging applications performed by the Nanox.ARC at the 2020 Radiology Society of North America Virtual Annual Meeting.”

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Article: DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

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DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

Rhian Hunt, 02 December 2020

Food delivery IPO DoorDash, rival to Grubhub (NYSE:GRUB) and other restaurant delivery services, attracted its first major analyst rating even before its shares are actually trading on the stock exchange. The news site Benzinga reported yesterday that investment banking, wealth management, and financial analysis firm D.A. Davidson rated the company as a buy and gave its stock a speculative price target of $93 per share.

Davidson analyst Tom White laid out a bull case for DoorDash based on several metrics, including its 2020 U.S. delivery market share of 50%. That is up from a 36% share at the year’s beginning and 17% two years ago. White also points out that the company still has lots of room for growth, providing service to just 6% of America’s population and handling 3% of off-premise restaurant sales (18 million customers and $8 billion in gross order value, respectively). The $93 price target represents a sixfold multiple of DoorDash’s enterprise-value-to-sales (EV/sales) ratio.
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Article: INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

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INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

GLOBE NEWSWIRE, 01 December 2020

On November 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Research (“Muddy Waters”) released a report entitled “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab.” Among other issues, the Muddy Waters report asserted that Multiplan is “in financial decline, and its financial statements were engineered to obscure this existing deterioration” and that the Company “is in the process of losing its largest client, UnitedHealthcare (‘UHC’),” which “has formed a competitor to MPLN that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest.” On this news, Multiplan’s stock price fell $1.72 per share, or 19.7%, to close at $7.01 per share on November 11, 2020.
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Article: DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

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DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

Daniel McCarthy, 01 December 2020

A lot of people have a lot of different opinions about DoorDash in light of their pre-IPO S-1 filing. Many reporters and pundits are concerned about profitability in the restaurant meal delivery category as a whole, wondering whether any of these firms could ever sustainably turn a profit. Many others are more optimistic, pointing to some of the (many) customer-related disclosures that DASH scattered throughout its S-1. And of course, all of this uncertainty is only further compounded by COVID, which was and has continued to be a big shot in the arm for everyone in the category, but introduces yet more uncertainty about how the world will look post-pandemic.

Given my own academic research with Elliot Oblander and Kivan Polimis into the industry, which I will hopefully be able to link to over the next couple of months (if you’re interested, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure send it to you as soon as it breaks!), and given the volume of disclosures that DoorDash provided in the S-1, I took a closer look at the company to uncover what its underlying unit economic condition currently looks like, how COVID has impacted it, and what their “normalized” economics may be after stripping out pandemic-driven behavioral changes.
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Article: The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short- Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

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The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

Michelle Celarier

Institutional Investor, 30 November 2020

More than a dozen short-sellers interviewed by Institutional Investor in an effort to penetrate this murky terrain say there are numerous players and various permutations of the model that may involve the sharing of ideas and research along with either a cut of the gains on the short trade or a set fee. In fact, some short-sellers believe that almost all of the activists have such backing — even those running small hedge funds themselves.

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Article: The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

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The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It

Michelle Celarier, 30 November 2020

John Fichthorn had been in the hedge fund business for more than 20 years when a half-hour phone call with a stranger put him on high alert. In December 2017, Fichthorn — a veteran short-seller and the founder of hedge fund Dialectic Capital Management — had joined the board of a troubled small-cap company called Health Insurance Innovations. But when he happened to mention its name to a prospective investor a year later, the man told him an alarming detail. Continue reading “Article: The Dark Money Secretly Bankrolling Activist Short-Sellers — and the Insiders Trying to Expose It”

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Article: Top official implicated in corruption scam with FSB links

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Top official implicated in corruption scam with FSB links

The Bell, 08 March 2021

The Russian banking sector was rocked by the arrest of several high-ranking FSB officers last year who covered up a bribery scandal (as reported by The Bell and investigative outlet Proekt). This week, we learned of yet another player in the scam — the deputy head of state-owned Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) that manages failing banks. An investigation by Meduza, VTimes and Proekt found that one of the agency’s senior managers set up a system that diverted funds to rescue struggling banks into the pockets of contractors (who paid kickbacks). Continue reading “Article: Top official implicated in corruption scam with FSB links”

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Article: Former Overstock.com CEO says he’s funding ‘a team of hackers and cybersleuths’ in an attempt to prove that Trump won the presidential election

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Former Overstock.com CEO says he’s funding ‘a team of hackers and cybersleuths’ in an attempt to prove that Trump won the presidential election

JOHN L. DORMAN, 29 November 2020

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said that he’s financing “a team of hackers and cybersleuths” in an attempt to prove that President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, according to The Daily Beast.

Byrne, who stepped down from his position at Overstock last year after admitting to a relationship with a Russian spy, recently went on the One America News Network (OAN), a conservative news outlet and a favored media destination of Trump, to detail what he described as a “rigged” election process. Continue reading “Article: Former Overstock.com CEO says he’s funding ‘a team of hackers and cybersleuths’ in an attempt to prove that Trump won the presidential election”

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Article: UBS refuses to produce trading data in HFT market manipulation case

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UBS refuses to produce trading data in HFT market manipulation case

Maria Nikolova, 26 November 2020

A landmark securities class action case involving allegations of market manipulation via high frequency trading (HFT) continues at the New York Southern District Court. The latest dispute in this case, which targets major US stock exchanges, concerns trading data. In particular, the plaintiffs in this case – a group of investors, allege that UBS Securities has to provide them with a decent volume of trade data. UBS, which is not a party to the litigation, says it does not have to do that.

On November 25, 2020, UBS Securities filed a Letter with the Court, requesting that the plaintiffs’ motion to compel it to produce a heavy volume of trade data be denied. Continue reading “Article: UBS refuses to produce trading data in HFT market manipulation case”

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Article: Palantir Technologies inc PLTR: A fraud since 2003?

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Palantir Technologies inc PLTR: A fraud since 2003?

MMa2019, 25 November 2020

Palantir has not made a profit since 2003. It is a software company that offers a product called ”Gotham” for the defense and intelligence sector, another product called ”Foundry” sold to the private sector. Both products run on a SaaS infrastructure called Apollo and use Amazon’s web services (AWS) as their PaaS. In 2015, during a promotion tour for his book “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir explains to the audience that one should be wary of “buzz words”:
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Article: Bill Browder threatens legal action over Swiss bank accounts linked to Magnitsky scandal

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Bill Browder threatens legal action over Swiss bank accounts linked to Magnitsky scandal

Sam Jones, 25 November 2020

High-profile Kremlin critic and investor Bill Browder has threatened Credit Suisse and UBS with legal action for breaching US sanctions if they unfreeze accounts belonging to three Russian clients accused of a huge tax fraud against his investment company.

The two Swiss banks hold assets worth more than $24 million (CHF21.8 million), which Browder says were gained from fraud perpetrated in Russia against his investment business, Hermitage Capital, in 2007. Continue reading “Article: Bill Browder threatens legal action over Swiss bank accounts linked to Magnitsky scandal”

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Article: Qatar starts legal proceedings against FAB in New York in market manipulation row

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Qatar starts legal proceedings against FAB in New York in market manipulation row

Reuters Staff, 24 November 2020

DUBAI (Reuters) – The Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority (QFCRA) said on Tuesday it has started legal proceedings in New York to compel First Abu Dhabi Bank to pay $55 million in financial penalty imposed by a Qatari court.

The Qatari regulator last year had fined United Arab Emirates’ biggest bank 200 million riyals ($55 million) for obstructing an ongoing investigation into suspected market manipulation, a charge FAB denied.

“FAB has failed to make payment against this final judgment rendered by the Civil and Commercial Court (QFC Court) in the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) thereby requiring the QFCRA to take steps to enforce the court’s judgment under well-recognised measures for international enforcement of money judgments,” the Qatari regulator said in a statement.

Qatar in 2018 alleged that First Abu Dhabi Bank, the United Arab Emirates’ largest lender, made “bogus” foreign exchange deals to harm Qatar’s economy after the UAE and other Arab states began a boycott of Qatar in 2017.

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Article: MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

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MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

Newsfile Corp., 18 November 2020

The investigation centers on MultiPlan’s financial disclosures leading up to- and through- its merger and going public transaction with special purpose acquisition (“SPAC”) company Churchill Capital Corp. III. More specifically, Hagens Berman is investigating the company’s and its sponsor’s statements about MultiPlan’s client base and revenues. On Nov. 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Capital published a scathing report, “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab,” based in part on its interviews of former MultiPlan executives.

Among other things, Muddy Waters observes: (1) the company and its sponsors concealed the impending loss of MultiPlan’s largest client (“UnitedHealthcare”, or “UHC”) due to UHC’s formation of a competitor (“Naviguard”) that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest; (2) MultiPlan’s financials “have been financially engineered to obscure the decay in its business;” and, (3) “[w]e understand that in 2018, MPLN released revenue reserves, dropping them from approximately 30% to 10% of revenue, which we believe enabled MPLN to show 2018 EBITDA growth amid shrinking sales.”
Continue reading “Article: MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud”