SEC charges corporate raider Carl Icahn with hiding billions in stock pledges

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Carl Icahn with hiding billions of dollars worth of stock pledges, resulting in a $2 million settlement with the legendary corporate raider.

Icahn, 88, will pay a fine of $500,000, while his firm will up $1.5 million as part of two separate settlement agreements after he failed to properly disclose billions in margin loans without disclosing them to shareholders or federal regulators.

The size of the settlement is dwarfed the damage done to Icahn’s investment firm, Icahn Enterprises (IEP), by a short-seller’s report last year that has left its shares down 68% and wiped more than $8 billion from Icahn’s personal fortune.

The firm has also slashed its dividend in half and has been forced to renegotiate the terms of its loans.

The agreements, disclosed on Monday, show that Icahn, whose net worth is now estimated by Bloomberg to be $6 billion, pledged up to 65% of stock in his publicly-traded Icahn Enterprises from 2018 to 2022.

7-Eleven target of $31B takeover bid from owner of Circle K stores

In exchange, he was granted more than $4.6 billion in personal margin loans by various lenders. A margin loan is when an investor can borrow against the value of securities they already own as a means of obtaining short-term funding.

“The federal securities laws imposed independent disclosure obligations on both Icahn and IEP,” said Osman Nawaz, the head of the SEC enforcement division’s complex financial instruments unit.

“These disclosures would have revealed that Icahn pledged over half of IEP’s outstanding shares at any given time. Due to both disclosure failures, existing and prospective investors were deprived of required information,” he added.

The probe was opened after a report by short-seller Hindenburg Research last year that claimed Icahn had “been using money taken in from new investors to pay out dividends to old investors.”

“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,” the May 2023 report alleged.

Owner of 60 Wall Street makes bold bet with $250M revamp: ‘Sink or swim for downtown’

The SEC reached no such conclusion in their investigation in which “IEP and Carl Icahn fully cooperated,” Jonathan Streeter, a lawyer for the billionaire investor said.

He slammed Hindenburg for making “false and totally irresponsible allegations that IEP inflated its net asset value and had ‘Ponzi-like’ dividends.”

“The government found absolutely no fraud and did not find any inflation of IEP’s (net asset value) or impropriety in its dividends,” Streeter added, saying the settlement announced on Monday was for an “unrelated disclosure violation.”

Icahn, who for years has bullied boardrooms through his investment activism, said: “We are glad to put this matter behind us and will continue to focus on operating the business for the benefit of unit holders.”

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR MORNING REPORT NEWSLETTER

Both settlement agreements said Icahn and his IEP investment vehicle have agreed to cease and desist from any repeat violations.

But in the carefully-worded statement, neither Icahn nor his firm admit or deny the findings.

Icahn’s Sunny Isles Beach, Florida-based company hold his various investments in the energy, automotive, food packaging, real estate and other industries.

The one-time Donald Trump advisor is IEP’s controlling shareholder with an 85% stake.

For decades, he has looked to snap up large stakes in companies he sees as being undervalued and then pressures them to make changes to their business strategies and boost their stock price.

Icahn’s portfolio currently includes low-cost airline JetBlue, snapping up a near 10% stake in February of this year, and Caesars Entertainment, a hotel and gambling company that owns some 50 resorts nationwide.

In 1985, he engineered a takeover of the now-defunct TWA, or Trans World Airlines, but in 1992 it filed for bankruptcy.

For top headlines, breaking news and more, visit nypost.com.