I think that you’re looking for more of an expert than me, but it wouldn’t take much investigation to confirm the 2nd point that I posted above. If they took a $2.2B loss on the sale of 12.5% of the stake, then they have about an $8.8B loss remaining on the other 50% that they haven’t sold or marked to market.
As a slight counterpoint, maybe the 12.5% sale went at a bit of a discount because it was a minority position. But still, it seems obvious that there are embedded losses in the remaining stake that they aren’t obligated to reveal. On this point, it isn’t necessarily fraud, but it is using specific accounting rules to avoid communicating to investors the true picture. So maybe the fair outcome is for someone to point it out to investors like he has.
Short sellers usually get a bad name, but they are the contrarians that keep things honest in many cases. If a company’s stock was undervalued and someone pointed out specific ways that its acccounting was understating its true value, few people would be screaming “market manipulation”. It’s only a bad thing if the information is purposefully untrue- pump and dump, etc.
