The 28-year old star hedge fund manager tactically criticized the German regulators’ comment on short selling a German company worth $14 billion. The female short seller’s remark on the ban came as a shock to a free and fair market.
Her notes to the financial regulator filled a 15 page, footnoted document explaining that the act of short selling essentially roots out fraud in the market and remains a vital tool for price discovery.
Fahmi Quadir, the founder of Safkhet Capital Management based in New York made her debut entry in 2015 with a bearish bet on Valeant. She took on Bill Ackman, also a hedge fund manager, who stayed long with pharma stock. Being unfavored, he expended a copious amount of money in billions to the short position.
The Safkhet Capital Management founder had also short sold Tesla and presently wishes to gain entry into the Germany market system. Financial Times Journalist suspect transactions between Quadir, other short sellers and Wirecard, a payment company based in Munich and worth €12.4 billion an equivalent of $14 billion. This suspicion of Financial Times Journalists was provoked by the interest of short sellers in the company as well as Quadirs’ response to the Wirecard story.
Without verifying the claims by the Financial Times journalist, BaFin, Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority issued a ban on short selling the stock in Munich. BaFin executed this step because it amounts to a severe threat and strategic to fostering market confidence in Germany.
The Germany ban which is a consequence of Streisand Effect didn’t go as planned with Quadir. The hedge fund star who had featured in a documentary series on Netflix responded to the ban by announcing on her letter a substantial short position on Wirecard. An excerpt of her letter reads,
“Market participants are quickly realizing that German regulators cannot be relied upon to effectively or objectively engage with the markets and are deliberately besmirching their fundamental duties. When such a degree of doubt is introduced as far as regulatory intent, market integrity quickly disintegrates.”
“The actions regulators have taken to combat market manipulation without offering proportionate attention to corporate fraud, is incredibly dangerous and perhaps indicative of a cultural complacency towards equal enforcement of domestic entities. Whether this is nationalism or regulatory capture, only you and your colleagues can reflect on; however, if gone unabated, the risk of corporate despotism increases.”
“BaFin’s decision unfortunately plays directly to the flourishment of a libertine corporate lifecycle where truth is treated as an illicit currency, journalists and whistleblowers are demonized, while executives are given free rein to act without fear of criminal enforcement.”
A spokesman of BaFin established that Fahmi Quadirs’ letter was received without any response yet to BusinessInsider. Nevertheless, Wirecard had denied any purported wrongdoing.
What is the Streisand Effect?
The above photograph was made famous when singer Barbra Streisand sought to have its publication suppressed, on grounds of privacy. The “Streisand Effect” is a term that evolved from the controversy, referring to the unintentional consequence of increasing public awareness of something through seeking to suppress information.
Image source: Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org
