GE Stock Is Plummeting After Madoff Whistleblower Alleges Fraud

Forensic accountant Harry Markopolos—who correctly identified the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme—released a 175-page report Thursday. In it he claims General Electric is a larger accounting fraud than Enron.

“GE’s $38 Billion in accounting fraud amounts to over 40% of GE’s market capitalization,” writes Markopolos. “Making it far more serious than either the Enron or WorldCom accounting frauds.”

The report focuses on General Electric’s (ticker: GE) former long-term care insurance business. Markopolos says GE needs an additional $29 billion in insurance reserves to cover the remaining policies. According to The Wall Street Journal, Markopolos shared the report with an unidentified hedge fund before its release and will share in the profits, if any. The Journal also said Markopolos hopes to collect a cash reward as a whistleblower.

“GE will always take any allegation of financial misconduct seriously. But this is market manipulation—pure and simple,” said CEO Larry Culp in an emailed statement. “Mr. Markopolos’s report contains false statements of fact, and these claims could have been corrected if he had checked them with GE before publishing the report. The fact that he wrote a 170-page paper but never talked to company officials goes to show that he is not interested in accurate financial analysis, but solely in generating downward volatility in GE stock so that he and his undisclosed hedge fund partner can personally profit.”

Earlier, a GE spokeswoman provided a statement to Barron’s in an email characterizing the claims as “meritless.” The statement goes on to say:

“We are extremely disappointed that an individual with no direct knowledge of GE would choose to make such serious and unsubstantiated claims. GE operates at the highest level of integrity and stands behind its financial reporting. We remain focused on running our businesses every day, following the strategic path we have laid out.

GE’s legacy insurance policies generated a $6.2 billion after-tax charge at the end of 2017 because incoming claims were much higher than expected. When the charge was announced in early 2018, GE planned to add $15 billion in cash to shore up its insurance reserves. GE hosted an insurance “teach-in” March 7 to address investor concerns about losses and accounting.

Problems with the long term-care insurance industry aren’t new. The entire industry mispriced the risk when writing policies a generation ago, and is working through higher-than-expected losses. The new Markopolos report alleges the scale is larger than previously disclosed.

GE stock is down 11% to about $8, trimming the year to date gain to about 10% in 2019, only slightly better than the 9.4% gain of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the same span.