(Bloomberg) — Icahn Enterprises LP shares tumbled after becoming the latest target of a short call by Hindenburg Research, which claims the company is overpriced and said it found evidence of inflated valuations for some of its assets.
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“We think Icahn, a legend of Wall Street, has made a classic mistake of taking on too much leverage in the face of sustained losses: a combination that rarely ends well,” Hindenburg said in the report.
Shares of Icahn Enterprises, of which famed activist investor Carl Icahn holds stake of more than 88%, fell as much as 24% Tuesday morning in New York, their biggest intraday drop since March 2010, after Hindenburg said it was short units of the diversified holding company.
Icahn Enterprises didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News.
In its report, Hindenburg says Icahn Enterprises’ value is inflated by 75% or more, noting that it trades at a premium of more than 200% to its net asset value. By comparison, other closed-end holding companies like Dan Loeb’s Third Point and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square trade at discounts to their NAV, according to Hindenburg.
The report also raises questions about the size of Icahn Enterprises’ dividend yield and the way in which it has been financed in recent years.
“Icahn has been using money taken in from new investors to pay out dividends to old investors,” Hindenburg said in the report. “Such Ponzi-like economic structures are sustainable only to the extent that new money is willing to risk being the last one ‘holding the bag.’”
Hindenburg’s research has gained prominence this year after it issued a blistering report in January on billionaire Gautam Adani’s business empire. Stocks and bonds across Adani’s conglomerate plunged in the wake of that release. In March, the firm run by Nathan Anderson, said it was short Block Inc., alleging the payments company had helped facilitate fraudsters.
Icahn himself has a long history of battling with investors and corporate executives with whom he disagrees.
A decade ago, he and activist hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman went to war over Herbalife Ltd., with Ackman calling the nutritional-supplements company’s business model a pyramid scheme and going public with a $1 billion short bet. Icahn, who at one point owned almost a quarter of Herbalife’s shares, defended the company’s multilevel-marketing model and publicly assailed Ackman — on stages and television, in documentaries and online — since an initial CNBC phone-in argument between the two billionaires.
In 2015, a debate at a Delivering Alpha conference between Icahn and BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink quickly devolved into a verbal slugfest, with Icahn dismissing an open letter by Fink, which argued that corporate CEOs shouldn’t repurchase shares just to satisfy activists, a “sales pitch for BlackRock” and calling the firm “an extremely dangerous company” over its exchange-traded funds.
More recently, Icahn has battled with Illumina Inc., with the activist shareholder saying the board of the DNA-sequencing company set a “new low” in governance by pursuing its acquisition of Grail Inc. over antitrust regulators’ objections. In a meeting with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza and Chairman John Thompson in early March, Icahn said he “would not even support Jesus Christ” as an independent candidate over his board nominees who “answer to me,” Icahn was quoted as saying.
Icahn said later in the month that Illumina representatives had “taken out of context certain things that were supposedly said” during discussions meant to be private “in the hopes of achieving peace rather than war.”
—With assistance from Katherine Burton.
(Updates with details from report and background on Icahn starting in second paragraph.)
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Source: finance.yahoo.com