NBH has released the following statement:
“Next Bridge firmly believes that we and our investors have a right to know, and Congress and the SEC have an interest and duty to understand, the total aggregate outstanding uncovered short positions held by foreign and domestic institutions that exceed the issued and outstanding shares of our company.
Unfortunately, this important figure remains unknown.
We call on FINRA and the SEC to take a more proactive ownership role in completing the necessary accounting for several key reasons:
First, FINRA and the SEC have access to resources, investigatory powers, and foreign information sharing tools, and we rely on them to serve as champions of the full and complete trading facts for the investing public and US companies whose securities are publicly traded under their oversight.
Second, we believe this information is necessary to help clarify potentially misleading information that has been disseminated to investors and the public.
FINRA issued an “Investor Insights” FAQ on its website stating that “there was an aggregate short interest position in MMTLP in accounts held at broker-dealers as of December 12 of approximately 2.65 million shares out of 165.47 million total shares outstanding.”
FINRA went on to characterize this volume as “not significant.”
We infer no intent to mislead by FINRA, but we note that this statement was not qualified to make clear that the scope of the data available to FINRA under the investigatory powers it cited was limited, and thus it implied a categorical summation of the entire uncovered short interest position in Next Bridge.
If FINRA is unable to report on the entire universe of the outstanding uncovered short positions in Next Bridge, including short interest positions held via foreign brokers, we request that they maintain full transparency of this fact in communications with interested parties and refrain from descriptions of the short interest as inconsequential until this is borne out via a comprehensive investigation.“
One of the biggest concerns is that uncovered short selling activity might have been carried out by entities that are also exempt from SEC registration or via transactions that are otherwise exempt from reporting.
This in it of itself is worthy of bringing to the table when involving regulatory structure and fair change for retail investors.
