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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

A Horrible Coincidence? or Insider Trading? CFO sells stock before Petfood Recall

Mark Wiens, the CFO for Menu Foods Income Fund, sold 45% of his stock for over $100,000 on February 26 and February 27.  He sold approximately 14,000 units that today would be worth just over $60,000.

He still owns 17,000 units and he owns options to purchase an additional 100,000 units at this time.

He told The Globe that it was a "horrible coincidence."

He claims he did not hear about the issues with the pet food recall until early March when over 60 million containers of pet food were recalled on March 16.  He stated that they've received consumer complaints at Menu Foods all the time, and they don't necessarily send those complaints to the top so he didn't know about the broiling problem. 

The Canadian company and their CFO have not yet been contacted by the Ontario securities commission or any other regulators regarding stock transactions leading up to the recall.  It does look likely however that they will pay a visit before too long due to the suspect timing of the transactions even if it is a "horrible coincidence."

Wind and if the securities investigators show up and do something, this may be one of the first times that a CFO has their dog supplies receipts audited as part of a securities investigation.  If he sold his stock short, did he take steps to protect his own pets??

2 comments:

Angie said...

I came upon this site by way of blogexplosion.

This is the first I'm hearing of this. I've had it on CNN all day you'd think this would be an important story.

Horrible coincidence? I doubt it!

Unknown said...

Yeah, I watched CNN most of the day as well. They were far more interested in Bahaman paternity issues.

I had to do a little digging into stories on Google News to track this down. I think since its a Canadian company its a little more obscure.