Responding to a Reuters story yesterday which said the Securities and Exchange Commission named Shopping.com in an investigation of investment fraud, Shopping.com, Inc.’s chairman today refuted the story’s implications.
“[The Reuters story] inaccurately portrays Shopping.com as the target of a
Securities and Exchange Commission investigation,” said Frank Denny,
chairman of
Shopping.com.
“The story was erroneously reported by the Bloomberg News Service, and has
since been retracted by Bloomberg. A securities firm which was a market
maker for our stock is one of the targets of the SEC action. We are
pursuing a full retraction of the Reuters story as it applies to our
Company,” said Mr. Denny.
The SEC charged Waldron & Co., a California-based brokerage firm which underwrote Shopping.com, with fraud. The lawsuit states that the brokerage firm and its former president, Cery B. Perle, “pumped up” the price of Shopping.com stock 255% from its IPO price of $9 to more than $32 per share.