TheStreet Search RSS Feed: Scott Eden

Icahn Calls Oshkosh Cheap

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:13:30 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The last time that corporate rabble rouser Carl Icahn went after an industrial manufacturer -- in 2007, when he tried to buy auto-parts maker Lear -- his efforts failed.

In disclosing his 9.5% stake in truck-maker Oshkosh Thursday evening, Icahn stopped short of calling it the first move in an attempted takeover bid. Instead, his filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, required whenever an investor builds more than a 5% stake in a public company, noted only that Icahn believes Oshkosh shares are "undervalued" and that he and his firm "seek to have conversations with management ... to discuss enhancing shareholder value."

Still, news of Icahn's play pulled in the arbs and other traders Friday. Shares of the Wisconsin company, best known for building armored personnel carriers for the U.S. military, shot higher by 12% in late morning action, changing hands at $32.56 on volume of more than 4 million shares during a normally sleepy pre-July 4 trading session. ...

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China-Biotics Auditor Quits, Alleges 'Illegal Acts'

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:50:09 EDT

(Updated from Thursday. Adds detail from BDO Limited's resignation letter.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The auditor of China-Biotics has resigned amid a series of explosive allegations that suggest the company's management may have committed acts of forgery in an elaborate scheme to report false financial results.

A Shanghai-based maker of probiotic yogurt cultures, China-Biotics revealed the resignation in a disclosure filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission following the closing bell Thursday, making it the latest Chinese company to see its auditor flee after accountants uncovered evidence of potential fraud while examining financial numbers in preparation for an annual report. ...

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Bigtime Investors Lose Big on China

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:53:40 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- There's an argument to be made that no one played a bigger role in popularizing Chinese small-cap stocks for widespread consumption than the smart money -- the boldfaced fund managers whose names and faces are always splashed on the covers of the financial magazines. When they started to buy big stakes in what had been obscure little companies doing business in remote corners of the People's Republic, the world took notice.

It helped, of course, that these companies were growing so fast that it was almost hard to believe.

Almost. ...

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China Fraud Plot Thickens With Fake SEC Suit

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:19:20 EDT

(Updated with further detail on the fake SEC suit.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A controversial short-seller who has made a career out of accusing Chinese companies of fraud was the victim of a hoax on Tuesday.

According to a document that rippled across the Internet, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit against Carson Block, the short-seller who composes critical reports on Chinese companies under the name Muddy Waters, alleging stock manipulation. ...

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Harbin Electric's LBO Skeptics Remain

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:32:36 EDT

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Doubts about the truth behind Harbin Electric's leveraged buyout persisted Monday, despite the company's announcement of a definitive agreement for a deal, long promised by the management of the Chinese reverse-merger company. ...

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China RTO 'Halt Parade' Continues

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:45:56 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Two more Chinese small-cap companies saw their shares halted this week as the scandal surrounding stocks hailing from the People's Republic showed no signs of abating.

First, it was China-Biotics on Wednesday. Then, on Friday, Nasdaq suspended shares of Yuhe International, a "leading supplier of day-old chickens raised for meat production."

Fourteen Chinese stocks listed on major U.S. exchanges are now halted. Some of the suspensions have lasted nearly three months as exchange officials sort through allegations of accounting chicanery, mostly lodged by audit firms that abruptly resign....

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China-Biotics: Latest RTO Trading Halt

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:04:35 EDT

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- China-Biotics became the latest Chinese small-cap company to have trading in its shares halted by a U.S. exchange as the fraud scandal surrounding the sector continues to widen. ...

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10 Vintage Stocks Worth a Fortune

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:32:12 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Pierre Bonneau gets a lot of phone calls like this one: An elderly woman who has come across a pile of forgotten stock certificates while sorting through her files. The certificates are from 1959 and bear the name General Telephone.

Bonneau's business, founded by his parents in Montreal in 1969 and called Stock Search International, exists to answer the question: Is there any underlying value to the equity ownership once guaranteed by these now-moldering pieces of paper?

For a fee, Bonneau, who now runs Stock Search out of his house on Martha's Vineyard, will attempt to find out. The core of the job is investigative legwork -- kicking around in libraries and the offices of secretaries of state -- and it's here that Bonneau discovered that General Telephone & Electronics was the result of a merger between General Telephone and Sylvania Electric in 1959, that the company changed its name to GTE in 1982, that several stock splits had increased the holdings by a factor of 10, and that the share owner of General Telephone & Electronics in 1959 was a share owner of Verizon in 2011. ...

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Nucor Outlook Highlights Unsure Steel Recovery

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:02:20 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- As more dour data from the manufacturing industries highlighted the uncertainty of this economic recovery, and investor sentiment continued to darken, the country's largest steelmaker, Nucor, offered a mixed outlook Wednesday.

In its traditional mid-quarter financial update, the Charlotte, N.C.-based company offered a profit forecast for its second period that appeared to fall below analysts' expectations. Nucor told investors that it would likely post per-share earnings between 75 cents and 80 cents. The consensus among 10 Wall Street analysts was earnings of 87 cents. (Nucor said the projected range includes an expected LIFO accounting charge of 6 cents a share. Stripping out the charge would boost Nucor's EPS.)

As Nucor strove to point out, the second-quarter numbers would represent year-over-year growth of between 160% and 180%. ...

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Deal Pace Expected to Persist Through 2011

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:00:35 EDT

(M&A deal story updated with further commentary.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In the business of M&A, it's a seller's market.

The pace of dealmaking in the United States has accelerated over the last 12 months -- including a flurry of activity just announced on Monday. ...

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SEC Warns on Reverse Merger Stocks

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:08:04 EDT

(Updated with further detail from the SEC's investor bulletin on reverse mergers.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The Securities and Exchange Commission put out an investor bulletin Thursday afternoon warning the world of potential fraud among companies that came public in the U.S. through a controversial method called a reverse merger.

Though the agency didn't single out companies hailing from China, a burgeoning fraud scandal among a raft of Chinese small-cap stocks that entered the market through the reverse merger process gave the SEC's bulletin a clear context. ...

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Is Cheap Debt Driving Paper Deals?

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:18:45 EDT

(International Paper-Temple Inland item update with further analyst commentary.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- International Paper's move to acquire Temple-Inland is yet another example of how low interest rates are motivating deals among manufacturing companies on the hunt for growth and increased market share.

Credit-worthy corporations are racing to take advantage of inexpensive loans before rates eventually rise, analysts say. "To borrow money now is cheap," said Thomas Mullarkey, a stock analyst who covers packaging makers and other manufacturing companies for Morningstar in Chicago. "IP can probably get 5% as an interest rate on debt for its Temple acquisition, while their cash is getting nothing. So almost any acquisition is going to be accretive to earnings," assuming that the company's base profit for 2012 remains flat. ...

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Peru Election Raises Specter of Mining Tax

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:02:54 EDT

(Updated to include analyst commentary and for closing stock prices)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The apparent election victory of a leftist presidential candidate who wants to hike taxes on mining companies has clouded the resource-extraction business Peru, which has enjoyed booming economic growth in recent years.

Shares of Southern Copper and Buenaventura, the most visible U.S.-listed plays on Peruvian mining, fell sharply in Monday morning trading in New York. Southern Copper, majority owned by the Mexican minerals giant Grupo Mexico, saw its shares drop more than 11% to $30.78, while Buenaventura, a gold and silver miner, plunged nearly 15% to $35.75. Peru's new president, Ollanta Humala ...

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Dry Bulk Hits Bottom: Anatomy of a Glut

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:55:39 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A monstrous ship steamed past Sugarloaf Mountain, the famous peak that rises from Rio de Janeiro's storied coastline.

Slowly the vessel, called the Vale Brasil, moved into Guanabara Bay, its wake ending in surf on the shoreline, and if the vessel's mighty girth looked as though it might plug the narrow straight that separates the bay from the open Atlantic, it would make for an appropriate image.

Freshly constructed by the Daewoo shipbuilding yard in South Korea, the ship last month was on a grand tour of Brazil, where it would eventually load its first cargo and make its maiden voyage from the iron ore-rich South American nation to the teeming steel mills of China. ...

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China RTO Yongye Gets $50 Million From Morgan Stanley

Tue, 31 May 2011 10:07:49 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The Chinese reverse-merger company Yongye International announced Tuesday that it got a boost from some big Wall Street money, receiving a $50 million investment from Morgan Stanley's Asian private-equity unit.

The move comes as a surprise. In recent months, institutional investors have increasingly forsaken Chinese small-cap stocks amid an expanding fraud scandal. At least 18 Chinese stocks are under trading halts or have been de-listed. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating the space since last year.

Recent problems at Longtop Financial, a Chinese company taken public through a straightforward IPO by Goldman Sachs, have increased worries among investors that financial accounting in the People's Republic isn't what it seems, and that overstated profits might be widespread. As with other Chinese companies this year, Longtop's Big Four auditor resigned, indicating that the company's management appeared to have forged bank documents and actively thwarted auditors' efforts to investigate. ...

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