Fisker Insiders Buy Shares, Push Back on Fuzzy Panda Short Raid

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Top Fisker (US:FSR) insiders, including the founders, bought Fisker shares in the open market on Monday after turmoil and share losses following a report published by short seller Fuzzy Panda Research.

On Dec. 1, “Fisker issued a cease-and-desist letter to the firm, which announced a short position in Fisker stock while releasing a purported assessment containing numerous false and misleading allegations about Fisker’s business operations and its relationship with manufacturing partner Magna.”

In an open letter published last week, Fuzzy Panda alleged that Fisker had loan guarantees to auto parts supplier Magna that it had not revealed. The short seller said those guarantees force the company to make at the market share offerings to fund operations.

If true, that would be dilutive to current shareholders.

According to a company news release on Monday, CEO Henrik Fisker and CFO/COO Geeta Gupta-Fisker, the founders, bought  33,700 class A shares on Monday. Chief Accounting Officer John Finnucan on Monday purchased 450,095 shares class A shares on Monday.

Citigroup cut its target price for the electric carmaker’s shares to $21 from $ 28 and rejigged its outlook with new data. The firm updated its model for the company using its most recent quarterly results, management interviews, and information garnered at a gathering to discuss and drive the company’s new Ocean EV.

“Overall, despite macro challenges, we continue to like the risk/reward here on relative valuation, our favorable view of the Ocean’s future commercial success and the company’s asset-light model/speed-to-market,” the Citi report said.

Fisker shares sport a relatively high 75.87 short squeeze score, according to Fintel analysis. That ranks it 680 out of 5068 companies screened. The current short interest time to cover is just under nine days and represents 29% of the company float.

This article originally appeared on Fintel

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