This year, Rotenberg says, GrowLife’s annual report revealed that Scott and other executives issued GrowLife stock worth $1.1 million to Scott and CFO John Genesi, and gave directors Anthony Ciabattoni, Jeff Giarraputo and Alan Hammer each 500,000 shares. In the fallout, Ciabattoni, Giarraputo, and Hammer were “caught with their hands in the company till,” and rescinded their grants of shares, the complaint states.
The company also paid president Marco Hegyi 25 million warrants for GrowLife stock, director Justin Manns 4,666,667 shares, Robert Hunt 12 million in stock options, and former GrowLife executives Craig Ellins and Bob Kurilko 500,000 and more than 1.6 million in shares, respectively, the complaint states.
Rotenberg claims the executives were given the shares at the bargain basement price of $0.02 per share, when shares were trading at $0.58 per share. Though Scott’s wife, Elisabeth Wedam Scott, was not given any stock the previous year, the complaint states that she and her husband offloaded more than 5.7 million shares on April 9.
After the annual report was filed, SEC issued a trading suspension against the company on April 10. But that did not stop Elisabeth Wedam Scott from attempting to dump an additional 8 million stocks on the market a day later, the complaint states.