The Foundation for Financial Journalism – Page 5 – Investigative reporting for accountability and the truth

Freedom Holding: The Red Flag Factory in Belize - Freedom Holding Corp. has some explaining to do. The financial services firm has quite improbably become one of the fastest growing companies on the planet. It lists its shares on the Nasdaq, is incorporated in Las Vegas, but for all intents and purposes runs its operations mostly in Kazakhstan. More...
Danny Guy, Derrick Snowdy and the Strange Wars of Confused Men - Derrick Snowdy is probably as close to a celebrity as Canada’s private investigator community has. More...
For Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Failure Is the New Winning - To U.S. oncologists who treat individuals with small cell lung cancer, lurbinectedin’s arrival was a big deal. The Food and Drug Administration permitted its sale in the United States under its accelerated approval program. Then the drug failed to meet the primary endpoint of its clinical trial’s Phase III. More...
Freedom Holding: After ‘Borat,’ the Silliest Kazakh Import of the Century - Investors might be shocked to learn what lies behind the recent muscular share price growth of Freedom Holding Corp., a Las Vegas–incorporated bank and securities brokerage with its principal office in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Freedom Holding’s astronomical revenue growth has seemingly made it the fastest-growing financial services company on Earth. More...
Penumbra Inc.’s Catheter Fail: Broken Tips and Lost Lives - Voluntary reports submitted to a Food and Drug Administration database, including entries from surgeons, paint a picture of a new Penumbra catheters whose safety problems the company may be forced to address in a substantive manner. More...
The U5 Loophole - The U5 is one of the most important documents on Wall Street. And negotiations to discuss them can easily become a battleground where employers and employees fight over whether an upcoming exit will be classified as a resignation or a firing — and if problematic behavior is revealed. More...
#MeToo on Wall Street: An Intern’s Battle With Barclays - Why did Todd Richter leave Barclays in the middle of 2018? What a young woman described to a reporter about her 2017 summer internship at Barclays might hold the answer. More...
Amy Walker’s War on Credit Suisse and a System of Entitled Indifference - For more than a decade Amy Walker, a research analyst in London, has been waging a ceaseless battle for justice in connection with what she alleges was a sexual assault by her colleague at Credit Suisse. More...
Fundamental Global Investors: Everyone Loses - After five years of Fundamental Global Investors’ oversight, three public companies have weakened financially and their share prices have collapsed. Many minority investors in these three public companies, as well as the hedge fund’s limited partners, have absorbed steep losses. More...
Q3 I LP: The Cryptic Doctors of Persuasion - Until late last year Dr. Quan Tran, a St. Petersburg, Florida, surgeon had an unusual side hustle. He served as one of three general partners of Q3 I LP, a cryptocurrency hedge fund that he helped launch in August 2017. More...
Fraser Perring: Chronicles of Deceit, Part I - A high-profile research analyst who identifies and bets on troubled companies has acquired an unusual and perhaps unwarranted amount of influence in the brief period of time he’s been in this line of work. More...
A Short Foray Into Social Service - After the Lincolnshire County Council hired Fraser Perring to work as a social worker, in January 2011 he began an assignment on the East Lindsey family support and assessment team. More...
Editor’s Note About Fraser Perring - It is unusual for an investigative reporter to reveal his sources, but to set the record straight I am acknowledging that Fraser Perring was a source in some of my previous Wirecard AG reporting. More...
The Pity of Wirecard, Part II: Bezzle Never Sleeps - If questions about the integrity of Wirecard AG’s accounting in its crucial Asian operations are ever to be resolved, Singapore regulators will need to step back and take a long, hard look at James Henry O’Sullivan’s relationship to the Aschheim, Germany–based company. Prosecutors at Singapore’s Consumer Affairs Department have been investigating Wirecard’s fast-growing Asian division,… More...
The Pity of Wirecard, Part I: Oliver’s Army - Few companies can explain their meteoric growth as alluringly as Wirecard AG. In one preferred narrative, Wirecard presents as Europe’s leading financial technology innovator, a globe-spanning developer of white label code and applications that remove the friction from electronic payments. And in another, it’s a nimble bank, steadily generating low-risk revenue through the sale of… More...
Wirecard AG: Something Is Terribly Wrong Here - After the Financial Times published a pair of whistleblower-driven exposés that suggested some of Wirecard's parabolic growth in the Asia-Pacific region resulted from a purported multiyear revenue inflation scheme, anyone wanting to better understand the German payments company's situation would do well to "follow the money." More...
Corcept Therapeutics: The Company That Perfectly Explains the Health Care Crisis - If someone wanted to use a Venn diagram to illustrate what is wrong with the U.S. health care system, picking the different sets would be easy: Price gouging, abuse of loopholes, hidden risks to patients, baffling regulatory decisions, marginal efficacies and the use of doctor payments to stimulate drug sales would be some logical choices. More...
Myriad Genetics: This Company Has Great Difficulties Telling the Truth - In early May several hundred investors, doctors and brokerage research analysts attended a dinner presentation after cocktails offered by the leadership of Myriad Genetics in Manhattan’s midtown. Salt Lake City–based Myriad, best known for its hereditary cancer tests, was in New York to tout new research on its increasingly popular GeneSight product during the American… More...
Myriad Genetics: It’s Good to Have a Pal in the Senate - To recognize what Myriad is today, it’s important to understand what happened on June 13, 2013. More...
Teladoc Health: A CFO’s ‘Other Life’ Worked Out Nicely (For the Ex-Girlfriend and Her Boss? Not So Much) - Work-life balance, an ever elusive goal for many American corporate executives, has been given a fresh new meaning at fast-growing Teladoc Health, a provider of on-demand medical videoconferencing. More...
Newton Glassman and Other People’s Money - Things are not going well for Newton Glassman. In April he was the subject of a lengthy exposé that detailed the many ways his direction of Catalyst Capital Group Inc., a Toronto-based private equity fund with $4.3 billion in capital commitments, and its sister company Callidus Capital Corp. should alarm investors and regulators. Plus, Glassman… More...
Acadia Pharmaceuticals: This Is Not a Pharmaceutical Company - Frequently sporting a $2 billion plus market capitalization, Acadia Pharmaceuticals brings to mind the work of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. His 1929 painting “The Treachery of Images” depicts a pipe with the inscription “This is not a pipe,” suggesting that an image and its meaning don’t necessarily correspond with each other. More...
Newton Glassman’s Legacy of Ashes - It was corporate skulduggery at its most audacious. Last September Frank Newbould dined at Scaramouche, a swanky downtown Toronto restaurant, with a businessman who said he would like to hire Newbould as an arbitrator. In reality, this was a ruse to engineer an attempted sting on Newbould, a retired Ontario judge, as the National Post… More...
Mr. Boyer’s War - For eight years, Craig Boyer was a senior executive at Callidus Capital, and by the time he quit in 2016 he was its chief underwriter and vice president. But last year Boyer sued Callidus for CA$100,000 in damages, claiming the company had denied him health and other benefits and seeking the return of his stock options. More...
Wirecard AG: The Great Indian Shareholder Robbery - Wirecard AG is the luckiest company you have never heard of. More...
DaVita Inc.: Warren and Charlie’s Excellent Insurance Gambit - Veteran card players pride themselves on their ability to discern what’s known as “the tell,” a series of involuntary mannerisms that can betray a rival's strategic deceptions and even suggest a possible next move. On rare occasions a tell metastasizes into a red flag, a clear indication that something is terribly wrong. An example of… More...
BofI Federal Bank: Annals of the Bank of Misery - If you put together all the chief executive officers from the financial services industry in one room and asked them, "Who looks back on the years 2007 to 2009 with fondness?" it's a very safe bet that only one hand would be raised. That hand would be on the arm of Gregory Garrabrants. The enterprise he has… More...
BofI Federal Bank: Disclosing Little, Saying Less - BofI Federal Bank's disclosure practices seem baffling at best if the standard it's judged by is how well it informs investors about developments that could potentially change the risk profile of their capital. More...
BofI Federal Bank: Sleeping With the Enemy Can Cost a Bank a Lot of Money - In the evening of Aug. 8, 2016, a retired hedge fund manager named Marc Cohodes was puttering around the house on his Cotati, California, farmstead when he received a most unusual phone call. More...
Synchronoss Technologies: You Probably Wouldn’t Buy a Car From These Guys - The velocity of the destruction of Synchronoss Technologies investors' capital is brutal to behold: In less than four months, the value of their investments has been halved. More...
Valeant: The End of the Michael Pearson Era - Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, the corporate poster child for price-gouging, tax-inversion and hedge-fund manager wealth destruction quietly severed all ties with J. Michael Pearson, its former chief executive officer and longtime guiding light, in January according to its annual proxy statement filed this morning. More...
Synchronoss Technologies: The Friends and Family Plan - Dec. 6 was an extraordinary day for Synchronoss Technologies’ shareholders. They woke up owning a stake in a company with a market capitalization above $2.2 billion. By the day’s end, however, Synchronoss had purchased IntraLinks Holdings, an unprofitable data-room developer, valuing it as if its stock were worth almost twice its then share price. Also… More...
Canadian National Railway: The Great Railroad Construction Robbery - For much of the past two decades Canadian National Railway Co. has been credited with revolutionizing the North American railroad industry. A theory of former company chief executive E. Hunter Harrison -- of “precision railroading” -- made him an industry icon and his shareholders very happy. But in railroading, as in life, how one gets… More...
Prospect Capital: The Enemy Within - John F. Barry III, the founder, chairman and chief executive of business development company Prospect Capital in Manhattan, can't seem to get any respect. More...
Barry Zyskind’s High-Stakes Three-Card Monte Game - A tiny footnote buried in a pair of corporate filings suggests AmTrust Financial Services' chief executive officer has a great deal of explaining to do about who owns almost 7 percent of the company's shares. More...
The Enabler and the Lifeline: Diamond Resorts and Quorum FCU - Purchase, New York, is a woodsy, suburban hamlet on the Connecticut state line that’s known as much for its residents' extraordinary wealth as it is for being the headquarters address for corporate heavyweights like MBIA, PepsiCo and MasterCard. The town is also home to Quorum Federal Credit Union, a small member-owned and tax-free cooperative; it… More...
Bear Stearns and the Bodyguard of Lies - More than seven years after Bear Stearns' collapse, its former senior leadership has pushed a narrative centering on the once-proud firm's collapse having been unforeseeable. More...
Globus Medical’s Inside Job - In February of last year spinal orthopedic device maker Globus Medical purchased Branch Medical Group, a key supplier and contract manufacturing operation based just 3 miles away from its Audubon, Pennsylvania, headquarters. It was no ordinary deal. More...
The Cost of Standing in the Gap - A key aspect of being able to constantly report and write pieces that afflict the rich and powerful is having comprehensive insurance coverage in place. More...
Diamond Resorts and Its Perpetual Mortgage Machine - Since 2007 the website of Diamond Resorts International has made people think their personal six-night stay in heaven is only a few clicks away. More...
Valeant Pharmaceuticals: The Great Wellbutrin Channel Mystery - With Valeant Pharmaceuticals' evolution from battleground stock to full-bore Wall Street circus, it is easy to forget that underneath the competing valuation narratives and regulatory drama is a real operating company. More...
Valeant Pharmaceuticals: Howard Schiller, Up in the Air - Shortly before 11 p.m. on Feb. 4, Valeant Pharmaceuticals CEO Howard Schiller took off from Dulles International Airport for home. It had been a long, tiring day of preparation, congressional testimony with plenty of blunt questioning and afterward came the inevitable debriefing with his legal and public relations advisory team. More...
Mr. Schiller’s $9 Million Worth of Reasons to Work Cheaply - Valeant Pharmaceuticals is the type of company that tends to make even the simplest things complex. More...
The Brotherhood of Thieves: Insys Therapeutics - Executives at Insys Therapeutics have continued to pressure its employees to develop new ways to mislead insurance companies into granting coverage to patients prescribed its drug Subsys, even as the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations is issuing a stream of subpoenas to former employees. More...
Murder Incorporated: Insys Therapeutics, Part II - The Insys that investors loved and that made its founder and chairman John Kapoor a billionaire is going away and, despite heroic efforts by company officials to rebrand it as a research and development-driven shop, its future will probably be less profitable, with little of the mercurial growth and compounding profits that defined its first four years. More...
Murder Incorporated: Insys Therapeutics, Part I - Insys Therapeutics is a company in a great deal of trouble. Starting late last year critical press reports detailed alleged business practices at Insys so aggressive as to make the company an outlier in the oft-sanctioned pharmaceutical industry. More...
Valeant’s Eastern Front - Poland seems a most unlikely place for the next chapter of Valeant Pharmaceuticals' saga to play out. Weighing in at about 3 percent of sales, the Polish operations are seemingly a modest contributor to Valeant's fast growing bottom line. More...
The Curious Case of Mr. Pearson’s 502,996 Shares - On Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ conference call on Nov. 10, embattled chief executive J. Michael Pearson offered several defenses of his company’s internal controls and procedures. More...
The Pawn Isolated: Valeant, Philidor and the Annals of Fraud - The Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation's story looking at Valeant Pharmaceuticals' well-concealed relationship with Philidor Rx Services, struck a nerve. More...
The King’s Gambit: Valeant’s Big Secret - If the name Valeant Pharmaceuticals International doesn’t ring a bell, its business practices should. The Quebec-based drug manufacturer's policy of implementing regular price increases that often run north of 100 percent has generated plenty of anger. Now a slim legal filing in California federal court is poised to make Valeant's world rockier still. More...
SIRF Wins Lawsuit and Strikes a Sharp Blow for Journalistic Freedom - The Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation has successfully concluded a litigation arising from its September 2014 story on Southern California-based medical device entrepreneur Anthony Nobles. More...
The Black World of Insys Therapeutics - Slowly but surely answers to the many riddles of how Insys Therapeutics could achieve its mercurial success are beginning to emerge. More...
Mr. Neuger and Mr. Fitzmaurice Decide to Pursue Other Opportunities - EcoAlpha Asset Management, a hedge fund that sought to capitalize on what it touted as the looming global natural resource scarcity, closed its doors last month. More...
Insys Therapeutics and the New ‘Killing It’ - On the evening of July 1, 2014, Carolyn “Suzy” Markland, a 58-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, resident with a degenerative disc disease, took her prescribed medicine -- a 400-microgram dose of a Fentanyl spray called Subsys -- and went straight to bed. More...
Irreproducible Results Inc. - The press release went out at 1:05 p.m. on March 26, and heralded big things for OvaScience, a barely 3-year-old company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is making quite a splash peddling a pair of seemingly revolutionary procedures to assist women struggling with conception. More...
The Hidden History of Social Media’s Financial Gurus, a Truly Occasional Series: The Case of Joe Donahue - At any given moment, Joe Donahue, a cornerstone and an investor in the popular StockTwits investing community and a veteran of a quarter century of trading, may be making another intraday call on a stock for his community of subscribers who pay him nearly $800 a year for his trading system. More...
Who Owns Our Water? - North Carolina is fighting a bruising legal battle against Alcoa over the aluminum giant’s claim to a strip of the Yadkin River that it has long used to generate electricity. More...
The Past Imperfect: Mr. Neuger and Mr. Fitzmaurice Would Like Your Money, Again - The website of a new Minneapolis venture, EcoAlpha Asset Management, strikes a different chord for a hedge fund, holding itself out to the deep-pocketed as not just a way to maybe beat the market, but as a vehicle to economically engage with the vexing questions of access to natural resources, population growth, wealth creation and… More...
Michael Karfunkel’s Bridge to Nowhere - It’s not every day that someone makes a $373 million grant of shares in a company he co-founded. But on Nov. 12 that’s exactly what the foundation of a fellow named Michael Karfunkel did when it gave his son-in-law’s foundation more than 7.21 million AmTrust Financial Services shares. More...
A Reckoning for the Hedge Fund King of Akron, Ohio - Anthony Davian, a once-prolific presence on social media who held himself out as a iconoclastic hedge fund manager prior to his August 2013 indictment on a series of fraud charges, was sentenced in a Cleveland courtroom to four years and nine months in federal prison. More...
The Invention of Professor Dr. Anthony Nobles - Let’s not mince any words about Dr. Anthony Nobles, a 50-year-old inventor, teacher, community leader, entrepreneur and soon-to-be space tourist: His life is vastly better than yours. More...
The Mitzvah Factory - Billionaires Michael and George Karfunkel opened nonprofit foundations to share their good fortune. Through the donation of large blocks of shares of AmTrust Financial Services — an insurance concern they built in the 1990s — their foundations have amassed considerable size as the share price has risen. Yet, a hard look at how these foundations… More...
The Life Fantastic: Michael Saylor’s All-Expense-Paid World - Michael Saylor probably vividly remembers March 20, 2000. After all it’s not every day that someone incurs what is the greatest single-day hit to personal wealth in capital markets history. More...
What’s in a Name? The Ongoing Saga of Medbox - In April 2011 Rishi Patel was on a mission: He was taking a hard look at business opportunities in the wake of Arizona’s decision to permit the sale of medical marijuana in dispensaries across the state. More...
The Copper Archipelago: Truth, Lies and InterCloud Systems - InterCloud Systems, a company familiar to Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation readers, put out a press release last week sharply disagreeing with the claim that it had hired a controversial public relations firm to promote its shares. More...
Kindred Healthcare Chairman Snares Loaded Retirement Sendoff - At Kindred Healthcare Inc., retirement gifts have gone way beyond the farewell cake, the cheap wristwatch and the sendoff reception at the local sports bar. More...
The Copper Archipelago: InterCloud - A recent New York Observer article ably framed what every investor needs to know about a curious enterprise named InterCloud Systems: Its prospects are marginal and the management doubly so. Experience, however, often shows that companies surfacing from the bronze deep of small-capitalization stock finance have rich backstories. More...
How to Effortlessly Earn a Riskless 90% on Bitcoins Through the Magic of Binary Options Trading - An ambitious African immigrant named Obawtaye Folayan appears to have a very big American dream but an unfortunate approach to realizing it. More...
Meet Benjamin Wey, Media Mogul - Sometime on Sept. 3, Maureen Gearty, 56, of New York City started receiving emails and calls from old friends and colleagues asking about the details of her torrid affair with a man named Ronen Zakai, a former colleague at two since-shuttered small-cap boiler rooms. More...
Bryan Caisse Comes Home - A former submarine weapons officer turned hedge fund manager, Bryan Caisse was arrested on Saturday in Bogota, Colombia, by officers from the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. More...
The People of the County of New York v. Bryan Caisse - Over five days in mid-October, prosecutors with the New York County district attorney’s major economic crimes unit brought forth a stream of witnesses who told a grand jury about a money manager named Bryan Caisse. More...
Brookfield’s Looking-Glass World - A wry investor might be forgiven for concluding that peering at Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management’s filings is akin to Lewis Carroll’s Alice peeking behind the mirror and finding a universe in reverse. More...
Tinkerer, Lawyer, Hustler, Lies: One Man’s Path to a Dope Fortune - In the spring of 2010, exasperated police detectives from all over Los Angeles began phoning the county’s consumer affairs department to complain that an outfit calling itself the Active Lawyers Referral Service had misled its working-class customers from 2005 to 2008 by referring them to a law firm that billed them for work — but… More...
The Man Behind the Marijuana Boxes - Shannon Illingworth is the founder and chief executive of AVT Inc., a Corona, Calif.-based maker of automated dispensing machines that manufactures the pot-vending units for Medbox. In November 2011 Vincent Mehdizadeh bought from Illingworth 50 percent of the broken-down shell of MindfulEye Inc. -- and in August 2012 the other half -- and renamed the… More...
The Penny Stock Lawyer - For anyone in need of a lawyer in Southern California who understands the needs of a company that may exist largely on paper (and may never materialize), Phillip Koehnke is the person to see. More...
The Very Difficult Summer of the Erstwhile Hedge Fund King of Akron, Ohio - On Aug. 4, 2012, a bright young mortgage department employee at J.P. Morgan named Ben Sayer was all smiles: The head of a rapidly expanding hedge fund said to have almost $200 million in assets — one Anthony Davian of Davian Capital Advisors — had invited him to attend his fund’s annual golf outing for… More...
Disclosure Diligence - Brookfield Asset Management’s disclosure practices have raised regulatory eyebrows before. More...
Northern Exposure - Though Edper became many things over the years of its operation from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, it began as a sleepy holding company for the shareholdings of its two original owners, Edward and Peter Bronfman, the scions of the Seagram’s liquor fortune. Despite losing 90 percent of its market capitalization from 1989 to… More...
A Rousing Relationship - A series of transactions beginning last winter involving Brookfield Asset Management and Rouse Properties (a New York-based mall developer in which Brookfield has a substantial investment) illustrates how complex financial moves with related parties can prove remarkably advantageous. More...
The Paper World of Brookfield Asset Management - Enter the name of Toronto-based public company Brookfield Asset Management into a search engine and it delivers more than 1 million results. The global conglomerate, whose annual sales exceed $18 billion, controls ports in England, owns Manhattan’s prestigious World Financial Center and sells Chicago a fair measure of its electricity. Yet the massive enterprise is better known for what it… More...
The Infernal Machine: From Powder to Dust - To understand why a company called ViSalus is the fastest-growing company of its size in the United States, just watch co-founder Nick Sarnicola in action at one of the company’s periodic sales conferences. In the video that ViSalus posted on YouTube of a July conference in Miami, Sarnicola’s turbocharged pitch inside a packed 18,000-seat arena… More...

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