Saudi Financier indicted for stock fraud

Bloomberg/NY Times:

A Saudi Arabian financier and a former executive of a defunct California telemarketing company were sued yesterday by federal regulators over claims that they orchestrated a $130 million stock loan and manipulation scheme.

The suit was filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi financier, and Ramy El-Batrawi, who was chief executive of GenesisIntermedia, a telemarketing company formerly based in Van Nuys, Calif. Mr. Khashoggi and Mr. El-Batrawi owned 85 percent of GenesisIntermedia.

According to the lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles, the two men lent 15 million GenesisIntermedia shares to Deutsche Bank Securities while artificially inflating the stock price.

"El-Batrawi, Khashoggi and others also drove up the price of the stock by engaging in large numbers of buys and sells," the S.E.C. said in the suit. "The buys and sells were often done in small lots of 100 to 500 shares, amplifying the false appearance of general investor interest."

...

Trading in GenesisIntermedia was halted in September 2001 after the shares fell 65 percent. The wreckage caused the failure of the intermediary brokers that handled the loans to Deutsche Bank Securities and saddled the Securities Investor Protection Corporation with a $42 million payout.

Mr. Khashoggi is best known as an arms broker in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980's, when he served as middleman for illegal sales of weapons to Iran.

There was something else that happened in September 2001. Has the SEC looked into whether this fraudulent scheme was used to finance those events? Are did the stock declined caused by events just reveal this scheme?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more

Apple's huge investment in US including Texas facility

Blaze: Apple announced a $500 billion commitment to infrastructure in the United States over four years, its largest commitment to domestic spending to date. Apple said it will expand teams and facilities in Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington as part of its new spending. With a new facility in Houston, Texas, Apple will reportedly double its investment in advanced manufacturing along with increasing investments in AI and silicon engineering. The company said in a press release that the Houston facility will produce servers to support Apple Intelligence, the "personal intelligence system that helps users write, express themselves, and get things done." ... The Texas facility will be for advanced technologies.   Texas has become a place that is very supportive of the tech industries.  Austin and Houston have seen much of the tech growth in the state.  Texas universities have been active in the AI field.
Read more