Clean Your PIPEs

By Robert Wilonsky Fri., Jul. 7 2006 at 4:52 PM

Categories: News

So, just got off the phone with a spokesman for the Securities and Exchange Commission about this story from today's New York Post. Turns out I was one of two reporters to bug the dude in D.C. today; the other was from Reuters. We wanted to know the same thing: Is, as the Post reported, Dallas-based hedge fund HBK Investments being investigated by the SEC "for its role in shorting stock ahead of its deal to buy private shares of publicly traded Plug Power, an upstate New York fuel-cell company in November 2003"? Well, of course, the SEC can neither confirm nor deny the investigation, so we'll have to take the Post's word for it. But if it's true, that's a big deal...we guess. HBK, which is named for its founder (Harlan B. Korenvaes, former managing director of Merrill Lynch) and based out of the Crescent Court in Uptown, had almost $10 billion invested in pretty much every company you can name, from A (Alcoa) to Z (Zoran) with everything from Blockbuster to General Electric to ExxonMobil to XM Satellite Radio in between. As for whether it did something wrong, well, we're not good with things like shorting stock; sheets, maybe. You can read the Post piece to get the goods. Us, we're sticking with the paper's coverage of Ann Coulter's plagiarism allegations. That, we can follow. --Robert Wilonsky