The SEC charged a serial con artist and a penny stock company CEO with misleading investors in a supposed vaccine development company by issuing false press releases portraying it as a successful venture when it was in fact a failing enterprise.
The SEC alleges that this individual teamed up with another CEO to defraud investors with extravagant claims about the microcap company’s revenue and other benefits flowing from a “shared revenue agreement” with an electricity provider supposedly operated by the individual. However, his entity was a complete sham.
“[These men] misled investors by widely mischaracterizing a worthless thinly-traded microcap issuer as a growing success with lucrative new business opportunities,” said Andrew M. Calamari, director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office. “Crooked penny stock promoters like [them] and their unscrupulous sidekicks, often company CEOs, must be held accountable to the investing public for the misinformation they so freely disseminated into the marketplace.”
According to the SEC’s complaint filed against these individuals and their companies in federal district court in Manhattan, one of them also spearheaded a separate scheme around the same time in 2010 involving another microcap company that similarly issued a rapid-fire series of press releases with bogus information. Those press releases touted a purported partnership with his phony power company to own and operate solar energy farms across the country. In reality, the microcap issuer was in dire financial straits and lacked the financial or logistical capability to commercially produce a product of any kind let alone break ground on energy farms. The company continues to have no operations, customers, or revenues.
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