Aurelius Value: Latest Reports

CIA: An Egregious Stock Scheme

Para leer el informe en espanol haga clic aquí (Citizens y CICA Life: Una Estratagia de Acciones Atroz) Research Summary Citizens Inc. (NYSE:CIA) uses a network of unregulated brokers to sell complex life insurance policies to foreign retail investors and retirees. The policies are sold through promises of outsized “guaranteed” returns backed by U.S. Treasury bonds. However, the money is not…

Pingtan Marine: A Fraud That Finances Human Trafficking and Poaching

Our research demonstrates that Pingtan Marine (PME) has engaged in fraudulent and illegal activities that conceal the reality that its shares likely have zero value.

Instead, most of the value appears to have already been transferred for the benefit of Pingtan’s Chairman and his family. The Chairman is using an alias to cloak his real identity from investors while sitting atop a syndicate of companies that use Pingtan to finance international crimes of fraud, poaching, and even human trafficking.

In what appear to be largely phony transactions, Pingtan has paid $910 million to the Chairman’s companies purportedly in exchange for fishing ships and fishing services. But substantial evidence shows that a significant portion of Pingtan’s fishing fleet actually consists of rusting hulks decaying inside abandoned fishing bases.

Farcically, Pingtan has paid the Chairman’s companies an average of $9 million per ship when the cost of new builds is only $1 million. Although Pingtan claims the majority of the embedded value comes from fishing licenses, our research shows that most of the licenses simply don’t exist. Even worse, many ships appear to have never even been transferred to shareholders to begin with.

To keep the funds from investors flowing, Pingtan has crafted a fictitious narrative and paid promoters to entice retail investors into buying its shares. The stock price has surged by a factor of 4x as management has fomented speculation that its fleet will soon be redeployed in Indonesia.

But Pingtan’s “growth story” is a hoax. Pingtan is specifically banned from Indonesia and a senior government minister has said she would report Pingtan to the NASDAQ upon suspicion of an “international fraud case.” Indonesian Armed Forces raided Pingtan’s key fishing base and the Government implicated Pingtan and its affiliates in serious crimes that include human trafficking, forced labor, illegal fishing, forgery, and bribing corrupt officials…

Legal and Safe Online Casino Payout

The payment institution plays the biggest role in online casino industry. The casino operator usually regulates all payouts at a certain time daily or several times a week, which means that player waits few days.

Another important point regarding the duration of the payout is the verification of the account. Best payout online casino will always request a scanned photo ID from all members on his platform before paying out winnings. As a player, you can use the site as long as you want without confirmation, however when you want to cash out, you are obliged to show your ID.

Verification of your own online casino account can not be avoided if you want to legally play online casinos in Canadian gambling sites…

KGJI: A ‘Fraud School’ Success Story

“Investors shouldn’t have to worry about the officers, directors and stock promoters taking advantage of them.” ― NASDAQ Official IMPORTANT – Please read this Disclaimer in its entirety before continuing to read our research opinion. All information for this article was derived from publicly available information. Investors are encouraged to conduct their own due diligence into these factors…

Vanda: In the Land of The Blind, The One-Eyed Man is King

In recent years, the public markets have witnessed a certain underclass of companies that have chosen to bilk the health care system at the expense of taxpayers and patients. Companies such as MiMedx, Insys, Valeant, and Turning have collectively deployed a playbook of various tactics including reimbursement shenanigans, billing schemes, off-label marketing, price gouging, bribing doctors, and retaliating against whistleblowers and short sellers. Although this playbook can be used to temporarily boost financial performance, inflate stock prices, and create windfall bonuses for executives, history demonstrates that companies resorting to this kind of chicanery often end in complete disaster for investors. Vanda and its CEO, Mihael Polymeropolous, in our opinion, may prove to be the next corporation to have embraced this ethos.

While Vanda shares surged to all-time highs in recent months, detailed but anonymous allegations of illegal sales practices and outright criminality quietly gathered steam on an industry message board named CafePharma. Meanwhile, Vanda experienced a mass exodus of employees, with authority over key departments reportedly being transferred to the CEO’s children and new hires lacking experience…

BANC: Our Response

“Throughout history, con artists repeatedly have found their way to positions of great power at large, public top companies” – Steven Sugarman in The Forewarned Investor, a treatise on identifying corporate fraud IMPORTANT – Please read this Disclaimer in its entirety before continuing to read our research opinion. All information for this article was derived from publicly available information…

TEUM: Where Are The Customers?

TEUM’s public claims simply don’t hold up to investigative scrutiny. For example, TEUM touted a contract with the South Africa based “Eyethu Mobile Network” as part of a group of deals, purportedly worth $50 million in aggregate, that TEUM says it signed in the last two weeks of August 2018. TEUM’s CEO & Chairman, Hal Turner, took to Twitter to promote Eyethu and declared that TEUM is “bringing change to South Africans with surprisingly unlimited cheapest data bundle”. Although Eyethu’s website is not functional, Eyethu’s CEO explained on Twitter in 2018; “guys in the midst of being unemployed, I started my own mobile network operator company, EMN Telecommunications trading as Eyethu Mobile”. Our investigators went to visit Eyethu/EMN’s headquarters but discovered only a dilapidated shack and crumbling structures near a rural African village (below).

Documents and detailed forensic evidence presented throughout this report shows that Eyethu is only the tip of the iceberg of small or defunct entities across the world that TEUM claims to have signed valuable contracts with.

MiMedx: Flying Too Close To The Sun

The research mosaic at MiMedx stirs memories of ArthroCare, a medical device company with a similar revenue recognition policy that inflated sales by “parking” millions in product at distributors before period ends. ArthroCare’s fraud relied on a distributor secretly controlled by insiders, which metastasized alongside a scandal involving improper relationships with doctors.

ArthroCare’s channel stuffing was first dismissed by some investors as impacting only a small portion of its business and the CEO initially blamed short sellers before he was eventually sent to prison.

MDXG shares trade at a premium of over 5x sales, even though the business generates minimal profitability. The risks facing MiMedx investors, in our opinion, are beyond elevated.

AeroVironment CEO’s Alleged Cover-Up Exposed

We are short AeroVironment (NASDAQ: AVAV) because the CEO, Wahid Nawabi, has orchestrated a cover-up of illegal activity and dangerous conduct, according to allegations in an undisclosed new whistleblower suit. The suit was filed by AVAV’s former chief of top-secret government programs, Mark Anderson, who had worked at the company for a decade. Some of the allegations in the suit include:

AVAV staffers allegedly transported live bombs on a commercial Delta Airlines flight in 2015. According to Anderson’s suit, this risked “the lives of approximately 230 passengers and innumerable civilians”.

Nawabi pressured employees to mislead the government about ongoing security violations and mishandling of top-secret information, according to the suit. Anderson says company lawyers “made an effort to threaten him” and that he was fired in retaliation for his whistleblowing activities.