When a Mississippian is tapped to head a publicly traded company, it’s normally news. That’s why it was interesting to see the absolute absence of press coverage (particularly from Patsy Brumfield and the Daily Journal or the Mississippi Business Journal) associated with Oxford native and former FBI agent Philip Halbert “Hal” Neilson, who has been a very public figure in Mississippi, after he got chosen to lead Here Enterprises this week.
Here Enterprises trades on what is known as “the pink sheets” or the OTCBB which is a relatively low volume exchange under the ticker (HRTE.PK), which finished trading on Wednesday 5/23 at $0.0006/share (that’s six ten-thousandths of a dollar or six one-hundredths of a cent). That makes the total market capitalization of HRTE at $491,400 (with 819,000,000 shares outstanding). We covered a little bit about what Here Enterprises did, but how Neilson, who spent the last two decades at the FBI got chosen to run a public traded microcap company isn’t immediately intuitive. However, his immediate predecessor was a professional motocross racer, so that may give some guidance.
These “microcap” stocks are sometimes affiliated with fraudulent “pump and dump” schemes where insiders accumulate large amounts of shares over time, manipulate trades and they pay internet marketers and boiler rooms (often overseas) to hype stocks and create a false market. Here Enterprises has issued (at least in the past) these similar Regulation S shares, which are targeted to trade overseas.
Something else that Here Enterprises shares is common ownership with a financial mastermind that has just been served an enforcement action by the SEC for $35,000,000 in securities fraud one week before Neilson was named CEO.
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