Litigation

Usana insiders unloading stock prior to the release of Barry Minkow?s report

By Tracy Coenen

This message was posted today on the Yahoo stock board. I sometimes forget about this. About the fact that Kroll tipped off Usana Health Sciences (NASDAQ:USNA) about Barry Minkow’s investigation of the company and how these insiders unloaded a ton of stock right before the release of the report.

From the stock message board:

Here were the real manipulators of the stock:

On Feb. 8, 2007 - Ronald Poelman excercised and sold 10,000 shares for $598,500

On Feb. 9, 2007 - Mark Wilson excercised and sold 10,000 shares for $613,500

On Feb. 12, 2007 - Myron Wentz sold 85,000 shares for $5,183,300

On Feb. 13, 2007 - Jerry McClain excercised and sold 5000 shares for $305,600

On Feb. 20, 2007 - Kevin Guest excercised and sold 18,000 shares for $1,092,960

On Feb. 26, 2007 - Kevin Guest excercised and sold 7255 shares for $442,555

On March 1, 2007 - Bradford Richardson exercised 15,000 shares and sold 5100 shares for $300,000

Six insiders dumped $8,536,415 in a period of 21 days just prior to the release of the March 15, 2007 fraud report against USANA. USANA wants to sue Barry for stock manipulation, but it was the top executives own bailing out that is to really blame. USANA never defended the fraud allegations and quickly initiated a lawsuit against Barry to divert attention away from the allegations. That also had an impact on the stock. And since that period, USANA has had a harder time recruiting more distributors because people are starting to realize that those Fraud Allegations were true.

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on May 08, 2008 (boomark / email).