The stock of a Singapore-based ed-tech and education company called Genius Group Ltd. rallied more than 200% on Thursday, after it said it appointed a former F.B.I. director to lead a task force investigating alleged illegal trading in its stock that it first disclosed in early January. The stock was last up 264% to mark its biggest-ever one-day percentage gain. Volume of 197.76 million shares traded crushed the 65-day average of just 634,17. Genius Group
GNS,
+239.93%
also said it would issue a special dividend to shareholders to help expose the wrongdoing and is considering a dual listing that would make illegal naked short selling more difficult.
The task force will include Richard Berman, also a Genius Group Director and chair of the company’s Audit Committee, and Roger Hamilton, the chief executive officer of Genius Group. “The company has been in communication with government regulatory authorities and is sharing information with these authorities to assist them,” the company said in a statement. Genius Group said it has proof from Warshaw Burstein LLP and Christian Levine Law Group, with tracking from Share Intel, that certain individual and/or companies sold but failed to deliver a “significant” amount of its shares as part of a scheme seeking to artificially depress the stock price. It will now explore legal action and will hold an extraordinary general meeting in the coming weeks to get shareholder approval for its planned actions. On the Genius website, Hamilton explains what the company, which went public in 2022, thinks happened. Genius’ IPO priced at $60 a share in April of 2022, he wrote in a blog. The company, which aims to develop an entrepreneur education system, then completed five acquisitions of education companies to build out its portfolio and reported more than 60% growth in its last earnings report. Analysts at Diamond Equity assigned it an $11.28 stock price target, while Zacks assigned it a $19.20 stock price target. “By all measures, we believed we were doing all the right things to justify a rising share price,” said Hamilton. The company then announced two funding rounds totaling $40 million to grow its balance sheet to more than $60 million, yet its s …