Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc (IPIX)

[slcimmuno]

On Market Transparency
petition for short and long positions to be equally disclosed

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"Biotech files rulemaking petition for pilot program mandating public disclosure of short-sale positions"

A rulemaking petition has been submitted to the SEC by a biopharmaceutical company that is “developing and marketing regenerative and therapeutic biologics.” The petition requests that the SEC promulgate rules to establish a pilot program that would mandate “periodic public disclosure of short-sale positions in securities of biopharmaceutical companies by investment advisers.” Will the SEC take action on the request in the petition?

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The company considers its experience to be “common to companies in the biopharmaceutical industry.” Although the company recognizes that some forms of short selling can “contribute to efficient price formation, enhance liquidity, and facilitate risk management,” manipulative short sellers “engage in practices that are not calculated as part of a rational and legitimate hedging or market making strategy, and often attempt to illegally manipulate share prices for personal monetary gain.” For example, manipulative short sellers “use various strategies to distort markets for personal gain. For example, the ‘bear raid,’ or ‘short and distort,’ strategy involves selling a security short in an effort to drive down the security’s price by creating an imbalance of sell-side interest.” According to the petition, “the short selling done in the shadows has become out of control, and it is causing significant dislocations in the U.S. financial markets.”

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To address these issues, the petition urges the SEC to “end the current lack of transparency of short positions which enables trading behaviors that unfairly harm companies and their investors.”

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=fe9a268d-0309-4e3e-9188-e7556022e3ad

https://www.sec.gov/rules/petitions/2017/petn4-712.pdf