The headquarters of Grifols.David Zorrakino (Europa Press / Getty Images)
Grifols is suing Gotham City in the USA. As threatened, the Catalan blood products company demands that the bearish fund compensate it for the damage caused by the report published on January 9th in which it accused the Catalan company of manipulating your accounts. And he's asking the court to put precautions in place to prevent Gotham from publishing new reports about Grifols.
Grifols has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Gotham City and General Industrial Partners funds and their founders Daniel Yu and Cyrus de Weck. The lawsuit alleges that these defendants “obtained a significant short selling position in Grifols by subsequently publishing and disseminating a report that contained falsehoods about Grifols' accounting, communications, finances and integrity.”
The Catalan company closed yesterday on the stock exchange at 9.56 euros per share, 32% less than the 14.24 euros at which it ended the session on January 8, before the publication of the Gotham report. The company has lost 2,780 million in market capitalization during this time.
The company announced that it would take legal action against Gotham just two days after the report was published. Grifols has sued Gotham. In an initial message to the market, he accused the fund of trying to artificially lower the price in order to make profits from the pessimistic positions it had accumulated. He also stated that the report's considerations were misinformation.
The fund – which had a short position on the company at the time the report was published, which was closed less than 24 hours after the stock market crash – accused Grifols of manipulating its accounts to inflate EBITDA and artificially reduce debt , for which he rejected a value of zero euros. The company was largely focused on consolidating two subsidiaries, BPC and Haemna, which it bought in 2018 and sold to one of its shareholders, Scranton, the same year.
The CNMV is also investigating Gotham City. The regulator, which has demanded additional information from Grifols about its ties to Scranton, is also investigating whether the pessimistic fund spread false information to cause a decline in the stock market.
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