
The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) says it doesn’t like over-the-counter shell companies especially when reverse mergers are involved, and would like to see them gone from the marketplace. To that end, its Enforcement Division cooked up an initiative it called “Operation Shell-Expel”. It began with a bang on May 14, 2012, when the agency coupled an announcement of Operation Shell-Expel with the suspension of trading in the stock of 379 dormant penny companies. It was, the SEC said, the largest such action in agency history. If Operations Shell Expel was such a priority to the SEC why is that we were able to locate more than 700 dormant public companies in the state of Nevada with minimal effort? What danger do these sorry companies present and if they are so dangerous why are there so many dormant shell companies still out there being fraudulently taken over?
The existence of empty shell companies can be a financial boon to stock manipulators who will pay as much as $750,000 to assume control of the company in order to pump and dump the stock for illegal proceeds to the detriment of investors. But with this trading suspension’s obligation to provide updated financial information, these shell companies have been rendered essentially worthless and useless to scam artists.
The shells were “rendered essentially worthless” because the suspension meant they’d be delisted to the Grey Market, the graveyard of bad pennies, in which market makers are forbidden to publish quotes.
Critics of rampant abuse in the OTC market cheered the SEC on, hoping Operation Shell-Expel signaled a new, and far less tolerant, attitude toward dormant shells that were often serially pumped and dumped. The following June, the agency suspended trading in another 61 issuers, and in February 2014, it followed up by shutting down another 255 shells. The hammer came down on 128 more in March 2015. There’s been no similar action in 2016. At the time of the 2015 suspensions, Enforcement director Andrew J. Ceresney remarked, “We are getting increasingly aggressive and adept at ridding the microcap marketplace of dormant shells within a year of the companies becoming inactive.” Many market participants see the SEC’s failure to pursue corporate hijackers of dormant shells as one of the greatest enforcement failures of the penny stock markets in the last decade. We have identified hundreds of hijacked tickers and/or companies involving fraudulent state court actions such as with minimal effort yet these types of shell companies continue to be hijacked by two or three penny stock law firms who assist the hijackers or sell the vehicles to unsuspecting companies seeking public company status. Our research reveals these shells have been used as the vehicles for many of the largest and most publicized securities fraud cases pursued by the Department of Justice and SEC. Yet there are at least 740 of these companies domiciled in the state of Nevada alone.
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Sponsoring Market Makers 101 – Form 211 and 15c-211 Requirements
The Role of Market Makers in Going Public Transactions
Market Makers play a critical role in the going public process when compiling information required by Rule 15c-211 and submitting the Form 211. The last step in a going public transaction is for the soon-to-be-public company to locate its sponsoring market maker for its Form 211. In order to obtain a ticker symbol, the company must be listed on a national securities exchange or qualify for quotation on the OTC Markets’ Pink Sheets, OTCQB, or OTCQX markets.
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