Auric Wins!!->Shopping.com saga comes to a close.Waldron & Co. convicted of market rigging scheme
msnbc.com
OPINION
By Christopher Byron
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
June 2 ? It took over two years to come to trial and be resolved, but this week an eight person civil jury in California confirmed what MSNBC.com exclusively reported in a series of articles in the spring of 1998: that a now defunct investment firm named Waldron & Co. had engaged in a massive market rigging scheme to corner the stock in an Internet retailer named Shopping.com, Inc. and force up the price of the shares through a complex gimmick known as above-market buy-ins.
IN THE CASE, the jury awarded the plaintiff ? a San Francisco hedge fund named Corsaire Partners ? $920,000 in total damages on a finding that Waldron and its back office clearing firm, Wedbush Morgan Securities, had cooperated in cornering the market for Shopping.com shares after the company went public in a Waldron-underwritten IPO. Thereafter, the jury found, Wedbush ? a leading securities clearing firm ? used its own capital to finance Waldron?s manipulation of Shopping.com?s stock price through so-called above-market buy-ins.
Above-market buys result when a short-seller of a security is asked by a buyer (a ?long?) to make actual delivery of the shares. If the stock is so scarce in the market that the short-seller cannot obtain the requested shares through open market purchases, the broker for the buyer of the shares can go into the market and offer a price high enough to induce an existing holder to sell ? then buy the shares at the offered price and simply charge the short-seller?s account.
On the Shopping.com trail
? On the Shopping.com trail
? Shopping.com resumes trading
? Compaq buys Shopping.com
In the case of Shopping.com, these over-the-market buy-ins forced the company?s stock price from $9 per share at the time of the IPO in November of 1997 to nearly $40 by February of 1998, making the offering one of the first dot-com IPO super-stocks of the late 1990s.
Advertisement
Quick Gifts
Swimwear
Books
Music & Video
Computing
Electronics
Toys & Games
More . . .
This gave Shopping.com a market value of more than $200 million when the business itself was almost worthless. To create the appearance of a thriving online retailing business, the underwriter of the offering had bought substantial quantities of office supplies from the Shopping.com Web site prior to the IPO but never disclosed that fact in the IPO registration statement.
Trading in Shopping.com shares was halted by the Securities & Exchange Commission following the MSNBC.com disclosures, and the company itself was eventually acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. for an aggregate purchase price of $257 million in February of 1999. Six months later Compaq bundled the asset together with the Alta Vista Co. search engine business that it had acquired in the takeover of Digital Equipment Corp. and sold an 83 percent interest in the package to CMGI, Inc., the big Internet holding company.
Bookmark this column
Christopher Byron's column appears twice a week.
? Click here to bookmark
As for the others in the case, Waldron Co. itself is now out of business and its president and CEO at the time, Mr. Cere Perle, is now an insurance salesman in the Los Angeles area. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is known to be conducting a criminal investigation into various aspects of the Shopping.com matter. |
