Last Week There Was A Mysterious New Jersey Deli Valued at $100 Million Dollars. This Week The Company's Consulting Deal Run By The Firm's Daddy Was Ended. Something Smells Fishy
CNBC - The mysterious $100 million company that owns only a single New Jersey deli on Monday killed the consulting agreement that since last May has been paying $15,000 per month to a firm controlled by the father of its chairman, according to a financial filing.
The move by Hometown International to end the consulting deal with Tryon Capital LLC by mutual agreement came after articles by CNBC detailing close ties between Tryon Capital partner Peter Coker Sr. and the deli owner, whose chairman is Hong Kong-based Peter Coker Jr.
The elder Coker is also a shareholder in Hometown International, whose sales in the past two years combined were about $10,000 less than what the company paid Tryon Capital in consulting fees.
“In light of the recent negative press regarding the Company and the principals of Tryon, the parties determined that it was in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders to terminate the Consulting Agreement at this time,” Hometown International said in its 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“The parties believe that such termination will reduce distractions and enable the Company to move forward with its planned acquisition strategy,” the filing said.
At the same time on Monday E-Waste — a shell company linked to both Coker Sr. and to Hometown International — ended its own consulting deal, which was paying Tryon Capital $2,500 per month, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing said.
The end of Tryon Capital’s consulting deals comes days after Hometown International was delisted from the more prestigious over-the-counter market platform OTCQB, and relegated to the less prestigious Pink market because of “public interest concerns.”
"oooh, what's this? smells like fish. - method man (judgement day)
There's a ton to this story if you go reading, that much more financially educated people than I can do much better job breaking down. But the strange thing is all the articles I've read on this seems to be ignoring the giant elephant in the room: this is in Paulsboro, NEW JERSEY here. Not Oklahoma or Arkansas (no offense to Oklahoma or Arkansas). South Jersey. A quick ride from Philly.
Nobody has thought that this is perhaps in some way, shape, or form tied to the mob? The same mob that has been forced to "pivot" in recent years to bootlegging and importing fake olive oil, infiltrating legitimate white collar companies, and even scamming wind energy tax breaks.
If they're going to these lengths to fill the buckets left empty by the big RICO crackdowns, and the major northeast bust of 2011, do we really think it's far fetched to think they'd set up this shell company whose sole holdings were a (one) single Italian deli with gross revenue to the tune of $35,000? And then pump the shit out of it to "$100 Million*"?
*If you dig a litter deeper, it turns out that as of last week this company could have actually been worth
Bloomberg - Last Thursday, the deli was a $100 million public company because you do that calculation by multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the most recent trading price of the stock, even if the stock barely trades; here, the “$100 million” number came from trades worth about $3,900 per day. But now it’s a bit more. Instead of trading a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of stock a day, it traded $212,799 worth of stock yesterday. Instead of getting its very high valuation from a tiny number of trades between, presumably, insiders, it has gotten a lot of public attention while pretty much keeping its valuation.
Actually I am sorry to tell you this, but the valuation is really much higher than that. From Hometown’s Form 10-K, filed last month:
The simple valuation math is that Hometown is worth $13.01 (yesterday’s closing price) times 7.8 million (the number of shares outstanding), or about $101 million. But ordinarily companies are valued based on their fully diluted equity value, taking into account stock options and warrants. Here, there are 7.8 million shares, but also an absurd 155.9 million warrants. That represents a fully diluted equity value of almost $1.9 billion.
2 fuckin BILLION!
I don't understand the first thing about the OTC market, or how to concoct financial schemes, but isn't this what they were doing in Wolf Of Wallstreet?
And same thing but not to the level, but done to perfection by the boys of JT Marlin in one of my favorite movies, Boiler Room.
Even more smoke from a Fast Company article-
Hometown’s eye-popping market cap can’t be explained by its sales. The deli’s revenue, never spectacular, has fallen each of the last four years, from a high of $76,213 in 2016 to $13,976 last year, when it closed for several months because of the pandemic. Yet even those numbers sound generous.
“I’ve never been there,” said Tina Kauffman, who lives two doors down. “I’ve lived here five years, and it’s never open.”
“I’ve come here seven, eight times,” added Paulsboro resident Ken Snyder. “Only one time it was open. But they said the cook was out.”
On a recent Saturday, at an hour when the deli’s Facebook page said it would be open, the doors were locked. A woman inside said it was closed for a “private event.” She declined to say when the deli would be open next or how to contact the owners.
Many neighbors living within a few blocks of the deli refused to talk about it at all. A man raking stones in his yard told me he had never been to the deli, but declined to give his name because “I don’t want someone throwing blocks through my windows.”
This Coker guy and his kid seem to be the front for a huge securities firm out of Hong Kong that is under investigation for a dozen different things. Now that the dominoes have begun to fall I think it's just a matter of time before bodies start to turn up in meat delivery trucks.
Either way this is going to make a hell of a Netflix documentary. If for nothing else, we have got some layups the past year for retrospective documentaries 5-10 years from now between all the pandemic, election, stimulus, and endless corruption stuff.
p.s. - is it really this easy to get rich if you have people that know what they're doing and have no morals/fear? Does the SEC do anything because it sounds like they're completely useless. For every Martha Stewart they crack down on it seems like there's tens or hundreds of no-names getting away with murder.