Word comes cascading over the wires today that shareholders in yet another
company whose stock is in the doldrums, Taser International, has filed a
junk
lawsuit against that all-purpose villain, the phantom menace known as naked
short selling. Forty Taser shareholders are suing a bunch of Wall Street firms,
which are responsible for the company's shares decreasing. Not Taser!
The
suit was filed by the Texas law firm of John O'Quinn, who has filed a bunch of
other junk lawsuits on the same subject and has yet to get a nickel from
anybody. This is the same O'Quinn who told Dateline NBC that naked shorting has
"put as many as a thousand companies into bankruptcy" resulting in "market
losses of more than four hundred billion dollars."
O'Quinn said that back
in 2005 (when I was writing
Wall Street Versus
America) and, since NBC didn't bother to do so, I called him to ask if he
could name some of those companies. I'm still waiting patiently, hand on the
phone, but he hasn't called back. Gee, you'd think that if there was even one
such company, maybe he would say what it is. (Another lawyer in the O'Quinn
anti-shorting legal consortium, Wes Christian, turned out to be a
big
seller of his clients' stocks.)
Taser has been a regular on the naked
shorting conspiracy circuit for such a long time that I'm surprised we had to
wait so long for this junk lawsuit. It is not an Overstock-style train wreck by
any means, but its
shares
are down 50% year to date.
Correction: Taser is not a party to the suit, as I
erroneously said in an earlier version of this item! My apologies to Taser
management for identifying them with the Baloney Brigade, which in my book is
one of the worst things one can say about a company.