Until a few minutes ago, I didn't know anything about John Ruiz or MSP Recovery.
I do know something about the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they are no joke.....Subpoena power, endless enforcement resources, and work closely with the IRS, which has its own well-known set of legal powers.
Just looked up the stock performance of MSP Recovery, NASDAQ symbol MSPR. The timeline from going public to today is suspicious to say the least:
- On May 23, its last day before a SPAC merger that took it public, it was valued at $10.78 a share.
- On the first day of trading, May 24, it closed at $5.06, losing over half its price from the day before.
- Next day, May 25, lost another 26%, closing at $3.73.
- Over the next 10 days, it bounced around between 94 cents and $1.20
- Then over a couple of days, popped to close at $2.69 on June 28.
- While that's still down more than 70% from the price the day before going public, it's more than double what it was just a couple of weeks prior to hitting $2.69.
Today (July 13), it closed at $1.62. One (Ruiz, maybe?) might say that's down only $1.07 from June 28. But you're dealing with a $2.69 reference point, so that's a move of just a hair under 40%.
You can smell stock price manipulation from here.
Did some more digging and found what MSP Recovery does. Here's an excerpt from a Forex.com website:
"Started in 2014, MSP Recovery Innovation is a Florida, US-based litigation company focused on recovering secondary insurance payments. Through legal action, it will seek to obtain reimbursements for clients such as government-funded healthcare programs Medicare and Medicaid, as well as commercial insurance and other healthcare organisations, from parties that the company believes should have paid the claims in the first place."
IOW, they're debt collectors for Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare payers.
The possibilities of what might lead the SEC to investigate are endless. But one of them is that the SEC believes MSPR misled investors by falsifying or outright fabricating the value of claims MSPR was pursuing -- which, if true, could account for the precipitous decline in stock price.
If those secondary insurance payers were being dunned for amounts that (1) they didn't owe, and (2) MSPR knew or had reason to know that the claims were invalid, that puts a-whole-'nother angle to the fraud.
Wholly unrelated to U recruiting, this could get fascinating and have implications for the whole SPAC industry. I'm no SEC lawyer, but I've been told by people who are that SPAC rules have loopholes in disclosures and reporting that you can drive the USS Gerald Ford through.