May 14, 2008
Enforcement Division
Securities and Exchange Commission
Washington DC
Gentlemen,
Many times in the last nine months or so, false, modified, or re-cycled news stories have appeared on the Yahoo stock pages in the Finance Section. I am specifically referring to the LDK Solar main page. Today, May 14, 2008, it happened again. This story was a reproduction of a story from Business Week on January 2, 2008 entitled Solar Stocks Get Their Day in the Sun by David Bogoslaw. It contains negative comments about LDK that have formed a pattern in the financial press. Since we are now several months after all these comments and NONE of them were have been true, it is noteworthy that it was re-released again today as the stock was breaking out of its recent range.
LDK is very heavily shorted and has over 15 million shorted shares out of about 17 million in circulation. (Note: the company has about 109,000,000 shares and about 74,000,000 of them are held by the CEO and are still restricted and not traded. Additionally, institutions hold over 17,000,000 shares. It has also been on the SEC FTD list for many months and several times has experienced days where the volume exceeded 30 million shares.)
These re-cycled news stories, always ones that contain very negative (and with hindsight, false claims), have appeared multiple times. The most common ones have been from Barrons and the Wall Street Journal. Usually they are pulled by Yahoo after complaints. Personally I have no idea who sends these stories out the newswires. They may come from the issuing organizations: WSJ, Barrons, Reuters, or Business Week. They may come from employees there who work for someone with an interest in attacking the stock for gain in a short trading context. They may come from elsewhere from a source that has access to the news story feed system. But it is clear that the intent is to reduce the price of the stock for trading purposes. This is clearly illegal and damages shareholders who invest in LDK for normal reasons. Whoever is behind this, whether it is one individual, company, or a group of either, is intentionally doing it.
I am attaching a screen shot and link to todays story. By the time you read this the link may not function if it has been pulled, but the screen shot is good evidence.
The link is http://www.businessweek.com/investor/con...
Please find out the source of this continuing abuse circulating false, dated, re-cycled stories about LDK Solar. Then please do your job and prosecute whoever it is.