From the New York Post, September 4:
A Bed Bath & Beyond exec was facing a $1.2 billion “pump-and-dump” stock-fraud suit when he apparently leaped to his death from his swank 18th-floor apartment in Lower Manhattan last week.
Gustavo Arnal, who was the chief financial officer of BBB, is among the defendants named in a class-action suit that accuses him, Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen and others of artificially inflating the troubled housewares giant’s share price.
The class-action complaint, filed Aug. 23 in Washington, DC, federal court, alleges that the scheme also involved “a classic attempt to spark a gamma squeeze.”
That tactic relies on the purchase of stock options and was employed during last year’s GameStop stock trading frenzy, according to The Motley Fool website.
Cohen, the chairman of GameStop, came under fire last month for making $68.1 million in profits by unloading a stake in BBB that reportedly included 7.78 million shares and options to purchase another 1.67 million.
On Aug. 16, the same day Cohen cashed out, Arnal sold 42,513 shares of BBB stock worth more than $1 million, the MarketBeat website reported at the time.
On Sunday, Reuters said its calculations showed that Arnal had actually sold 55,013 shares but didn’t say how much he netted.
Arnal died Friday in what cops believe was a suicide plunge at 12:20 a.m. from his apartment at 56 Leonard St., a skyscraper known as the “Jenga building” because of its unique exterior, which resembles an uneven stack of blocks....
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