On Friday, Citadel Securities chastised Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes for a letter he issued to the Nasdaq mentioning Citadel Securities and other big market businesses after warning of possible illegal short selling of Trump Media stock.
“Devin Nunes is the proverbial loser who tries to blame ‘naked short selling’ for his falling stock price,” claimed a spokeswoman for Citadel Securities, highlighting the significant drop in Trump Media shares since it began public trading with the DJT ticker in late March.
Citadel Securities’ founder and non-executive chairman, Ken Griffin, is a big contributor to Republican candidates, including Nunes, a former GOP congressman whose company owns the Trump Social app.
“Nunes is exactly the type of person Donald Trump would have fired from [The] Apprentice,” claimed a Citadel Securities spokeswoman, alluding to the former Republican president’s business competition reality TV show.
“If he [Nunes] worked for Citadel Securities, we would fire him, as ability and integrity are at the center of everything we do,” said a spokeswoman for Citadel Securities.
A spokesperson for Trump Media responded with the following statement: “Citadel Securities, a corporate behemoth that has been fined and censured for an incredibly wide range of offenses, including issues related to naked short selling, and is world famous for screwing over everyday retail investors at the behest of other corporations, is the last company on earth that should lecture anyone on ‘integrity.'”
Trump stated in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission later Friday that it issued that answer on its Truth Social platform as well as other channels.
“Rather than support our common-sense efforts to promote transparency and compliance, Citadel Securities bizarrely targeted our CEO with an unhinged attack,” the company stated in its filing.
The same day Trump Media alerted the SEC that it had sent shareholders precise instructions on how to prevent short sellers speculating on the stock’s decline, Nunes wrote a letter to Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman.
While Trump Media’s stock has climbed considerably in the last three days, it remains significantly lower than its inaugural opening price on March 26.
The company, which owns Truth Social and had only $4.1 million in revenue last year, has seen its market capitalization fall by billions of dollars as a result of the share price decrease.
In his letter to Friedman, Nunes stated: “I write to bring your attention to potential market manipulation of the stock of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.”
Nunes asserted that traders used Trump Media’s price for naked short selling, a practice in which the seller did not borrow the shares for the transaction.
Nunes stated that brokers had a “significant financial incentive to lend non-existent shares” to short sellers due to the exceptionally large premiums they could demand for such loans of Trump Media shares.
“Data made available to us indicate that just four market participants have been responsible for over 60% of the extraordinary volume of DJT shares traded: Citadel Securities, VIRTU Americas, G1 Execution Services, and Jane Street Capital,” Nunes said in a statement.
