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Well now I hardly have anything to complain about with this company anymore. Gotta find something else to do I guess. I bought a tiny position just to see what happens. Still going to be a challenge for Chuck, I'll buy a few more if things keep changing for the better.
I doubt Abe will be able to do that much damage whatever he decides to do, he seemed to have trouble spelling the name of his new company correctly.
There is no excuse to make excuses for Nelson at this point.
Not every company exploits their shareholders so flagrantly as Nelson did.
The founders didn't bear any significant risk, they manipulated the markets and shareholders with lies to get themselves rich. Their total initial investment was less than $100,000 (just enough to incorporate the company and start selling shares to retail, from which the other 99.5% of invested funds came) from which they reaped over $10M.
The entire purpose of the company from the start was a method of financial engineering that exploits shareholders for the benefit of management. The plan for shareholders to eventually benefit was a lie. Not every company just makes up lies from whole cloth to exploit retail investors.
As I said earlier the guys who made the money invested about .5% of the capital, whereas retail investors invested the other 99.5%. The company with literally a shell to push a scheme of wealth transfer. The cell business model was just a fake cover-up for said scheme.
It's easier to get someone to buy into a fantasy than to accept reality.
Nelson simply did not care about the truthfulness of what he said.
He lied, and lied intentionally, in order to make himself and Greg Boden (and a few others) money. Everything he said, his demeanor, and every press release was calculated to manipulate retail investors into buying shares.
And he succeeded. He won. Now all he needs is for everybody to blame Chuck for the failure to turn the company around and his task will be complete.
Almost all the money people spent investing in this company is sitting in a few bank accounts in Santa Barbara.
If you want to sell at $1, sell at $.99999.
Almost every day a few shares trade at $1, which resets the clock before the de-listing letter. There is a lot of incentives for many to have a few shares trade at that price. If you sell for .9999 they have to buy everything you are selling before getting there.
The board change was a definite positive though, Nelson and his cousin in law can now be outvoted.
Might want to wait until a real auditor is appointed before you do that.
Balance sheet is incredibly weak - they are relying on cash generated from customer deposits to keep working capital at workable levels. Last year almost no cash came from that source.
Actually that was a PR for three things, ROTH and business updates as well.
The announcement being buried at the bottom and not included in the headline.
Hence - low profile
No PR? For an annual report this is pretty low profile.
My guess there are some big changes going to be disclosed tomorrow and the less people paying attention the better.
Perhaps some addition board changes etc- something caused the Chardan guy to suddenly say the company was entering a “transition period" when Q4 really should have been the conclusion of said period.
Whatever they do it will probably be like putting down a beloved family pet stricken with cancer - it might be necessary, but it won't be pleasant.
Abe seems to be moving ahead to compete with Sunworks - filing trademarks recently.
https://trademarks.justia.com/877/92/ise-87792587.html
What a con against shareholders this whole operation was.
Big questions ahead: Abe founded the company with Emil and Mike - will they leave with him?
How important are the personal relationships Abe has with current and potential customers?
I seriously can't believe I'm seeing this in the AP. There is a lot they haven't found yet. The CEOs they have running these things aren't the big players. Nelson, according to a book by his wife, was also just about bankrupt at one point. I guess when you are bankrupt and have 10 kids to feed you do what it takes.
Nelson really is not the main guy in all of this, it's the people who actually seeded SLTD with the initial money. Nelson and those like him are basically just the guys they get to market shares to investors so they can cash in on their scam. And the crux of the scam is promissory notes.
I think Cargile seriously underestimated the baggage this company had when he took the job.
Trumps campaign manager is the one getting scammed in this situation by the way.
Scamming the campaign manager for the sitting President of the United States!
These Santa Barbara guys are big time now. I hope they come to regret it, more important people than stay at home bloggers will be looking at them now.
A little more detail on some of that stuff from my notes. The work here is incomplete but it's probably worth sharing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS6UaxbH2wSk4ydy41UMP-kvDmAgCdCXnEtdZ2IbaKiSv0a2cgaEv0nJLJctw1XsB23g-6V1klE9YW7/pub
Greg Boden, the CFO for CloudCommerce, is one of the P-note holders.
Jonathan Lei was one of the P-note holders by the way, the ones that created Solar3D and ripped everybody off. This is what I have been talking about for years, glad it's finally going mainstream.
SLTD was created by long time scammers and the outcome (shareholders being screwed while they got rich) was forgone. Unfortunately it's probably too late to do anything now.
Sales never really grew that much organically here. They grew in two ways:
1. Acquisitions
2. Burning through cash from the Cowen raise
When acquisitions stopped and they had to slow down cash burn to avert bankruptcy... sales growth stopped too. Not to mention the accounting issues and management turnover.
Those amateurs are only now pulling in 25% numbers?
Jimmy N and Changwan were on the brink of that way in 2011!
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111213005854/en/Solar3D-Projects-25-Efficiency-New-Silicon-3-Dimensional
Someone should let them know that it's not too late to get back in the game!
Most of these rumors are made up by people who are trying to manipulate others into buying worthless crap. If Market Makers wanted to "signal" each other they could just use any number of messaging systems like a phone or Discord, not a system so easy to understand that penny stock investors figure it out. It's pure non-sense to think they would use a system like this.
Just from a quick google search you can see there are no real sources for these rumors, outside people who try to sell penny stocks to suckers with such legitimate sounding titles like "Penny Runners".
Easy game here:
- Buy a bunch of shares in some illiquid garbage company.
- Buy 911 shares in that same company
- Take a screenshot of your trade.
- Post the screenshot and say "OMG guys the MM's are signaling that news is coming!!!"
- Sell your stock to anyone that falls for this
All these rumors and stuff that get propagated about how penny stocks trade generally serve one purpose - to screw people who believe them out of their money. Most of the money made in penny stocks by anyone (both companies and traders) comes from defrauding others through trickery and lies.
A robot wrote that article, and every other article about anything on that site.
I agree with this for the most part, but from my research I believe Nelson is actually just one player in the M&A stuff SLTD and the other Santa Barbara companies are doing. From what I have been able to figure out (I got like a 50+ page document about this), I believe Nelson does these types of deals with a small group of people in Santa Barbara. Specifically some people named Greg Boden, Jonathan Lei (using his relative Elaine Lei as a false front), and Jim Bartlett. These names might sound familiar because aside from Nelson they are three of the four founding shareholders of SLTD (The fourth, Beifuss, seems to be out of the game now).
CLWD, whose CFO is Greg Boden (who owns the p-note I always complain about) has been doing some really shady deals recently. They are somewhat similar to the SUNW deal but much more toxic to the acquired companies. They seem to be duping unsophisticated small business owners into selling their business for worthless penny stock shares. You can actually call the phone number for CloudCommerce and it says "press 3 to be acquired".
Based on an anonymous tip I got from someone at the company, it looks like one of them is blowing up with the acquired company feeling completely ripped off. The other one is underwater but no overt sign of discontent. The second company is interesting because it's owned by Brad Parscale who ran Donald Trump's digital marketing campaign.
The key action that both Abe or shareholders could sue the company for, in my opinion of course, is the change in the promissory note (owned by Greg Boden) which altered it's value by millions of dollars in Greg Boden's favor. Long story short (I showed all the paperwork for this a while ago), this that the note was changed from a $1.50~ conversion price to $0.338 conversion price. Making it over four times as valuable at the expense of shareholders.
Jim Nelson and Greg Boden are close (they share the same office on their respective company filings, Invest West LLC for Nelson and CLWD for Boden), and according to their social media profiles seem to be close personal friends as well. Given this, it's suspicious that Nelson would have the note changed to be much more valuable for Boden without providing a compelling reason.
The people who would oversee this decision are Franklin Hunt as chairman of the audit committee. Hunt happens to be related to Jim Nelson, which could impact his impartiality. The auditors could also check that out. The auditors at the time were HJ and associates, of which Franklin Hunt was a partner with. HJ has also been recently decertified for negligent audits of fraudulent companies.
The auditors were then switched to our current auditors, which also happen to have Greg Boden (CFO of CLWD) as a client. Greg Boden's relationship with those auditors goes back further than Nelson. It's a tiny shop in Boca Raton, FL of which SUNW is their only client listed on a major exchange.
I was actually able to talk to Greg Boden about this (by cold calling his cell phone). He told me he didn't remember anything about the note and to ask him about it in writing. So I sent him the questions, it's been over a month now with no response and all attempts to follow up have been ignored.
Long story short: The people that really pull the strings (and where the $$$ looted from shareholders really went) are the original founders of SLTD. One of them was a convicted felon on probation using his relative as a front (in my opinion to conceal his relationship to the new company). A very nice house on the north side of Lake Tahoe was built shortly after one of them liquidated, so the money isn't all gone. Since the money is outside the company already, shareholders would potentially be able to obtain more cash from these people (they looted more cash than the company currently has in the bank), and would be able to do so without devastating the current company, that is perhaps an interesting place to look if impropriety in the dealmaking could be proven.
All of this is of course, just my opinion.
Not necessarily criminal in my opinion, but civil (again in my opinion).
He was setting up a company to compete with Sunworks while still at Sunworks. As soon as this information came to light (thanks to jwalking who first posted it here), his name was removed from the management page within days and now he seems to be out all together.
He was doing this while he was still a member of the board of directors, and this is a BLATANT violation of his duty to shareholders. This is where shareholders could probably sue him (if they could find a lawyer to take on a case of this size).
Not to mention a massive conflict of interest (it would be in his best interest to move clients from Sunworks to his new business, which he could more easily do while in a top management position at Sunworks).
It's also a direct violation of his employment agreement, which also covers a period of time after he leaves the company. Not sure if he never read his own contract, or if he just doesn't care. (And this is where the company could sue him)
Abe deleted his LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abe-emard-2056b640
There are some older / auto-generated profiles still in existence. But this was the one that was most up to date, and it just got deleted in the last few days.
He could be getting in a lot of trouble for what he did. Hope he has a nice lawyer!
Just so everybody knows, this is an exit filing, meaning we will not be seeing form 4s from Abe in the future.
Nelson put out a PR in February of 2017 in regards to the cell literally while his personal friend and business partner Boden was dumping shares, yet didn't think to tell the new CEO about it a few weeks later.
This is what a scam looks like. If you held through this period, you got scammed. Sorry!
The first two sentences are not an opinion, the CEO as recently as November of 2017 did not know what the cell was. This means nobody told him what it was. If the project was real and important (even if put on hold), why did Nelson not brief the incoming CEO on it? This should not be interpreted as an attack on the current CEO, it would hardly be fair to expect him to assume Nelson was acting in bad faith in regards to the transition period.
The most obvious answer is because the more Nelson talks about the cell, the more red flags it raises about all kinds of things.
The project was explicitly abandoned in early 2017 in the days before Chuck took over.
As for Chuck, the new CEO doesn't even know what the cell is. Which means that in his entire time on the board of directors and in the transition period, it wasn't worth mentioning to him by Jim and friends. The primary issue with the cell is that it was a fake project to get people to give Jim Nelson and his friends money, full stop.
I don't think we will be seeing any more form 4's from Abe now that he is off the board and removed from management (no official announcement but he was removed from website). We will find out for sure when the company files their next proxy. Abe + everybody else included in the stock comp plan should be included in that.
It isn't. It will make it more difficult for the company to turn a profit, which the company had great difficultly doing even in more favorable times.
The stock is up along with the rest of solar stocks simply because the tariff is better for the industry (or less bad for the industry) than had been feared.
Weather for Q4 was basically perfect for solar installation, just about as dry as it could be. Let's see what the numbers look like now that they cannot use that as an excuse anymore.
Q1 on the other hand is shaping up to be very wet, with several big storms already and more on the way.
There is one actually (assuming he doesn't now have a totally new contract), which makes it very bizarre for Abe to be creating a new solar company owned by himself at the same time he is removed from management. It's difficult to guess exactly what is happening, but it would take some very creative thinking to view it as positive for the company / stock.
In case it wasn't quite official yet, Abe is off the management page of the website: https://ir.sunworksusa.com/management-team/
Older version: https://web.archive.org/web/20170206062803/https://ir.sunworksusa.com/management-team/
And now the founder of the original company Abe is appearing to go into direct competition with Sunworks with a brand new company paid for by you the shareholders!
Remember when the company surreptitiously changed Abe's p-note to be worth millions more back in 2016... some investment that was!
Emil and Mike do not file form 4's and haven't for a long time. I am not sure why we never got an exit 4 like Van Slooten did the other day. The only way you can know they sold shares is that the number of shares they hold is reported in the proxy statements. Based on those, it seems they are selling as much as Abe does, and as I said earlier they each have the same deal as Abe in terms of shares from stock comp / promissory note.
This is a really good point, it's possible this is just spillover from speculation in RGSE, since both companies share a lot of similarities.
But there is a lot of cross over with RGSE investors and people who thought trading SUNE after bankruptcy wasn't anything other that committing brokerage account sepuku. IE just because something is happening, doesn't mean anybody knows anything.