Cantor Fitzgerald pays $6.75 million to settle SEC prices over deceptive SPAC disclosures

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Wall Road brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald has agreed to pay a $6.75 million penalty to settle Securities and Alternate Fee prices that it misled buyers in blank-check corporations it managed, the regulator mentioned on Thursday.

“No investor was ever harmed by the alleged points described within the order,” Cantor Fitzgerald mentioned in an announcement. “We’re happy to have concluded this matter by mutual settlement with the SEC.”

The agency’s chairman and CEO, Howard Lutnick, was lately nominated by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to function Commerce Secretary.

In keeping with the SEC, Cantor neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s findings.

Clean-check corporations, or particular goal acquisition corporations (SPACs) are shell corporations that increase funds by an inventory with the intention of buying a non-public firm and taking it public, circumventing the preliminary public providing course of.

In keeping with the SEC, in 2020 and 2021 a group of Cantor Fitzgerald executives managed and managed two SPACs that raised $750 million from buyers by IPOs forward of the SPACs’ eventual mergers with View and Satellogic.

Of their SEC filings, the SPACs mentioned they’d not had substantive discussions with potential takeover targets previous to their IPOs, although Cantor, performing on behalf of the SPACs, had already commenced negotiations with View and Satellogic, the SEC mentioned.

“This enforcement motion displays the easy proposition that any disclosures about substantive discussions with potential targets should be materially correct,” Sanjay Wadhwa, performing director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, mentioned in an announcement.