When SPNGQ hits a negative PPS, buy it all! I'm putting my limit order bid in to buy 3 billion at -$0.0001
On a more serious note, I agree w/hasher - Pike is not an innocent buyer. His non-DIP informal "loan" was most likely a last ditch effort to get a seat on the creditor committee and to find a way to engineer a "friendly" BK trustee who would consent to a quicky reorg financed by Pike to avoid exactly what has happened - forensic accountants coming in and subpoenas going outt~.
It din't work outt~ as he hoped, and I suspect we will eventually learn he was involved in money laundering and/or taking personal kickbacks for buying stock into his funds. It may have worked like this:
"Hey, Dan, you run those hedge funds, which are a great source of cash. If you buy $10,000,000 worth of shares (either from the company or to support the PPS while Mett and I dump our nominee-held shares into the market you're supporting), Mett and I will give you $1,000,000 cash under the table. Sure, your hedge fund shareholders will suffer a bit of a loss, butt look at the tax-free cash we're handing you (personally) under the table."
It's similar to Richard Strong (of former Strong Funds) and other mutual fund managers who were front-running and buying shares of a stock for their personal accounts before they bought the same stock for their funds at higher prices, then dumped their personal shares while their funds were buying them up.
Except in this case model, there is no personal account trading records (which is what caught Strong and his buddies) - just under-the-table cash kickbacks to the fund manager for supporting the market for the insiders to dump into via nominee accounts.
My bet is that Pike is as dirty as a 3-year-old boy digging in the garden and playing "dumptrucks and bulldozers" after a rainstorm.
If my model turns outt~ to be correct, it is totally consistent with Pike stating to the trustee that his funds "lost" $15 million. Because perhaps his hedge fund accounts did. That doesn't necessarily mean HE lost anything.
There is no SEC form for reporting under-the-table cash payments or having insiders set up a nominee cash account for you in Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, or Israel.
BTW, instead of cash, M&M could have set up those Lichtenstein accounts and assigned SPNG treasury stock to them and one or more of those accounts could be for Pike's personal benefit. He could have used the hedge fund accounts to support the market price while he and the Mutts were dumping the shares from the Lichtenstein accounts.
There are many ways that would explain his actions other than a bona fide hedge fund manager making a huge mistake despite doing extensive DD that any reasonably intelligent investor could have spotted as a total scam from the get-go.
