Muddy Waters’ Carson Block joined Bloomberg Television’s Stephanie Ruhle today on “Market Markers” and said There is no doubt NQ Mobile (NQ) will be delisted within a year because over 90% of NQ mobile revenue does not exist. Carson also said:
– China doesn’t punish fraudsters
– His team spoke to NQ Mobile Officials
– His team visited 10 addressing of Yidatong
– Caught NW Last week in more lies
Block on whether NQ’s CEO recent comments to Bloomberg News is a lot of ‘Hocus-Pocus’ still:
“This is just them playing the shell game and are very poorly trying to recover from the lies that they have previously told. That CEO…we caught the company just last week in some massive lies about her involvement with NQ. She has been far more involved with NQ than the company had been willing to admit. In sort, their largest customer is a shell. It is controlled by NQ. It is an undisclosed, related party and it does not exist”
On thoughts on why the market is rebounding:
“We have seen this every time. We go out, we call CCME a massive fraud – this is really a redux of CCME’s… then the companies and its proxies are able to pump it back up and when they’re gone. This is familiar to us. We really have seen this movie before. We have no doubt that in a year from now, this company will have been delisted and the people on the U.S. side who are right now standing I am talking about the U.S. Management – we think a year from now that will have lawyers and they will be saying, ‘How could we have known? We really weren’t involved.’ This process takes a little while. We are happy so far.”
On where they had accounting deceptiveness:
“Over 90% of the revenue does not exist. We can start with the revenue line being massively inflated. As is profit. The company has made a number of acquisitions. It usually pays with them in stocks. But what we can cane, some of these companies are empty boxes and they’re paying tens of millions of dollars of shares for them, which we believe, is basically a way to put more money in the Fraudster’s pocket. I think there is confusion between when we are saying something is a business fraud and when we are saying something is an accounting fraud. An accounting fraud you are gilding the lily, you are boosting profit, maybe you are inflating revenue some. When you are a business fraud, like this one, the vast majority of what you claim exists; in fact it does not exist.”
On whether 90% of their revenue is fake:
“Yeah, our estimate is that over 90% is fake. It is hard to tell with precision. We know that the number one purported source of revenue does not exist. We published a piece this Tuesday called NQ’s Top 10 lies since Friday which would have only been four days earlier.”
“I would like to highlight two lies. Number one the lies about the CEO’s involvement with NQ and the timing that she left. We caught them red-handed and they had to fess up on their call but they did not explain why they had lied. And number two they finally revealed the identities of their second and third largest purported customers. However, as we show, that was just a poorly conceived lie because based on their disclosures, the names that it gave those numbers two and three could not actually be those customers. It was yet another lie about the revenue. Number one does not exist. It numbers two and three do not exist in the way near that the company says they do.”
On whether he should really understand what is going on, on the ground in China:
“It is a strange claim that we have not been there. I have a team. And our team has visited – as we wrote the report, we went to 10 possible addresses for Yidatong. Half of them did not even exist. The company says we use service offices. Let me emphasize, half of the addresses do not physically exist. There is no office building at the address that they gave. That is not normal behavior in China. So we went to 10 addresses and we have also been to their purported address that they disclosed to investors on the conference call. The truth is there is not even on Yidatong sign in the lobby or on the Marquee for that company. The sign that exists is for a company called ‘Nineh.’ That is the business that operates there. Yidatong is figment of the imagination. No one had heard of the company. It is not on the door.”
On whether anyone on his team attempted to speak with executives at NQ:
“Yes, and we did. We got answers to some questions. Some answers don’t make sense. For example, we asked repeatedly for a breakdown of where they sell internationally. They were always cagey about that. We asked for a list of sellers of their prepaid cards. They now come out and say they have 5,000 sellers of these pre-paid cards. They release a list of the handful. All the Beijing sellers are in the exact same shopping mall. We asked for these items before and they refuse to give them. That’s because these parties don’t exist”
On whether someone could go to jail over this:
“Yeah. Unfortunately, with all of these China frauds that we have seen, the fraudsters don’t get punished. The Chinese don’t punish them. That is something investors need to understand. To pull this off, you need collision from people. Sometimes you need help from somebody from a bank that gets bribed”
On whether there are crooked bankers involved:
“They usually are able to co-opt people at the bank. People are at the bank are making if they are really good, maybe $1,500 a month. You are running a fraud or you can make nine figures, you peel off some money and a consequence-free environment. And that is the key. Again, nobody in China ever gets in trouble for defrauding U.S. investors…. They actually in some cases get rewarded for defrauding U.S. investors. This is something people have to keep in mind.”
Video for viewing here.
Bloomberg Television
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