Following last month’s Reuters report that Samsung had made an offer to buy BlackBerry for as much as $7.5 billion, the Canadian OEM experienced a stock price surge.
Now, federal investigators are beginning a probe into whether investors purposefully fed acquisition rumors to the press in order to profit off the resulting BlackBerry share spike, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Reuters cited unnamed sources who said the two companies had entered preliminary talks. Shortly after the report surfaced, BlackBerry CEO John Chen issued a statement denying that any talks had taken place with Samsung about a potential acquisition.
Still, BlackBerry stock jumped as high as $12.60 per share on the rumor. The company’s stock has since come back down to $10.05 per share, still above the $9.71 it was at the day prior to the Reuters report.
Now the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Ontario Securities Commission could potentially be looking into insider trader allegations for company representatives, though the report says preliminary investigations don’t often lead to formal charges.
The rumored bidding price of $7.5 billion for BlackBerry was well above the $4.7 billion Fairfax Financial Holdings in 2013 briefly agreed to pay for BlackBerry before the deal fell through.
Filed Under: Devices
