Former Overstock.com Inc. Chief Executive Patrick Byrne reportedly sold off his entire stake in the company and blamed the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he referred to as “the Deep State’s pets.”
In an SEC filing Wednesday afternoon, Byrne disclosed the disposal of his roughly 4.8 million shares in Overstock, or more than 13% of the online-furniture company, during the past three trading sessions, MarketWatch reported. All but 87,000 shares sold on the open market for roughly $90 million, with the remainder was given as a gift to an undisclosed recipient, MarketWatch said.
In a blog post, he rattled on about a government conspiracy to help the company’s short sellers as the reason for the sale, the New York Post reported.
“The proximate cause … came when we heard over the weekend that starting last Friday, the Deep State’s pets at the SEC began leaking something to their clients JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman,” Byrne said on his blog.
“They leaked that they were going to Bazoomba [destroy] our digital dividend. Once that started getting back to me, I realized this: Whenever I have had any question about whether the SEC would or would not do something totally outrageous in order to hurt our company to benefit their clients on Wall Street, they never let me down: they always did the evil thing.”
The Post also has reported that Byrne had put the company’s short sellers in a bind before banks like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley came to the rescue. As a result, the stock pop Byrne helped create in recent weeks has deflated — just in time for him to sell.
Overstock’s shares (OSTK) closed down more than 8%, to $16.19 a share on Wednesday. That’s on top of a 40% drop from midday Friday through Tuesday.
Byrne resigned last month, saying distraction and fallout related to his involvement in a Federal Bureau of Investigation Russian espionage probe made it difficult for him to lead the online retailer, Reuters explained.
Many investors were skeptical of Byrne’s reasoning and immediately pointed to public disclosures made by Overstock about what appeared to be a widening investigation by the SEC’s enforcement staff into Overstock’s new blockchain business, started by Byrne in 2018, to create a crypto stock market, Fox Business Network has reported.
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