DAVID EINHORN: Oh, you’re — you’re — you’re getting more than — than I could help with anyway. So, this is good.
PUNCH CEO: Okay. That’s fair enough. Well, one day we’ll get you a round on a pub crawl around some English pubs. Read more
Or, the UK’s FSA slaps a £7.2m fine on David Einhorn and Greenlight Capital over trading in Punch Taverns shares in 2009. First, the case from the FSA:
On 9 June 2009, Einhorn was a party to a telephone conference in which it was disclosed to him by a corporate broker acting on behalf of Punch Taverns Plc that Punch was at an advanced stage of the process towards a significant equity fundraising. This was inside information and Einhorn should have appreciated this. Read more
Shares of Moody’s fell sharply on Thursday after hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who correctly questioned the health of Lehman Brothers four months before its collapse, disclosed he was shorting the ratings agency, reports Reuters. Einhorn, whose Greenlight Capital manages $5bn, said Wednesday the parent of Moody’s Investors Service undercut the value of its primary business – assigning grades to bonds – after giving AAA ratings to insurer AIG, mortgage banker Fannie Mae, bond insurer MBIA and other companies later revealed to be badly overextended. Read more
David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital has opted off the SEC’s no-short list.
Here’s the Nasdaq statement. HT Naked Shorts. Read more
Is it a case of “anything you can do, I can do worse better” at Natixis?
The French bank, which needs to replenish capital after about €3bn worth of subprime-related writedowns, said today it will go ahead with its planned rights issue. The catch? It’s selling new shares at a 61 per cent discount to yesterday’s closing price of €5.84 euros – deeper than many analysts had expected. Read more
Hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital is best known (now) as the prolific shorter of Lehman Brothers.
His very public evisceration of the bank in May sparked huge falls in its share price. He brought down CFO Erin Callan. His most damning conclusion was that Lehman needed more capital. He pulled no punches: Read more
Natixis has come under attack from a US activist investor who is pushing the French investment bank to scrap its €3.7bn rights issue in favour of reorganising its capital structure. David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, on Monday wrote to Dominique Ferrero, chief executive of Natixis, proposing the bank raise capital by redeeming some of its cross-shareholdings in Caisse d’Epargne and Banque Populaire, its controlling shareholders. Einhorn has been in the spotlight recently for publicly questioning the value of Lehman Brothers’ assets. Natixis unveiled its rights issue last month as part of a plan to boost its capital reserves, after losses on complex debt securities Read more
Amid an implosion in the subprime mortgage market, David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager who runs Greenlight Capital, is resigning from the board of New Century Financial, reports Dealbook. The company, which faces an inquiry into its accounting and mounting credit problems, made Mr. Einhorn a director last March after Greenlight Capital, a $4.7bn fund and New Century’s second-largest shareholder, threatened to wage a proxy fight. New Century Financial also on Thursday said it had stopped accepting loan applications from prospective borrowers and was negotiating with creditors to whom it owes billions. New Century shares, which traded as high as $50 last May, fell a further 25 per cent to $3.87. Should New Century file for bankruptcy protection, it would impact a number of large Wall Street and commercial banks that have extended billions in credit to the company. Read more
Allied Capital, a business lending group locked in a bitter battle with a hedge fund, said that federal prosecutors have asked for information on how it obtained private phone records from the hedge fund’s president. The statement from Allied is the latest salvo in a complex five-year fight between the lender and hedge fund Greenlight Capital, headed by David Einhorn. Greenlight has been betting against Allied’s stock for five years, claiming the company overvalues some assets. An Allied subsidiary, Business Loan Express, has been under investigation by the US Attorney for the District of Columbia and the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting issues. Mr Einhorn and Greenlight have also filed a federal lawsuit, in the name of the US government, alleging that BLX submitted fraudulent loan documents to the federal Small Business Administration. Mr Einhorn has also claimed that Allied used “pretexting” – using a false identity to obtain private records from the phone company – to get hold of his and other Allied critics’ phone records. Read more
Hedge funds have plumbed many corners of the markets in search of returns, reports the Wall Street Journal. Now Greenlight Capital, a fund with a big negative bet on Allied Capital, is heading for the courts.
The $4bn fund has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta – in the name of the US government – claiming that Business Loan Express, a subsidiary of Allied Capital known as BLX, submitted fraudulent loan documents to the Small Business Administration, bilking the US of millions of dollars. Read more
1Man walks into a gold bar. Au!
2The end of QE?
3The persistent supply-side constraints in US housing
4Bird, plane, Abe
5Bove vs Bloomberg, redux
Show more6A glorious episode in the history of the Revenue
7Stress you next year
8An unusual bear market
9The short arm of the SEC
10Breaking up is hard to do - Rio Tinto edition
Show fewer