Bill Gates Penny Stock Follow-up: An Analysis of Bad Data

A couple days ago, I wrote a short article about how I found Bill Gates listed as a 10% or more beneficial owner of a small Canadian uranium mining stock called Uravan Minerals Inc. (UVN.V), which trades for less than $2 per share. I emailed the company to verify the info but never heard back.

I did a little more research and went to the Yahoo Finance listing of all insider transactions and discovered some more interesting information. Someone named A Jerrold Perenchio was listed as being an officer who sold 35,283,384 shares of the company at $36.25 per share on March 29, 2007 for a total of $1,279,022,670. That's right, over $1.2 billion. Perenchio happens to be #89 on the Forbes 400 list and has a net worth of $2.6 billion.

The only problem is that Uravan has never traded above $2 per share in its history. The Yahoo Finance site said that the data was provided by EDGAR Online, a private company that is not affiliated with The SEC's EDGAR. I went to EDGAR Online and found that Uravan didn't even come up in their database.

I finally called up Uravan's corporate offices in Calgary, and spoke to Heather who is the Office Administrator there. First she told me that Bill Gates is not and has never been a shareholder of the company. Second, when we went through the list of insider transactions, we discovered that the names of the officers and directors didn't match. She also confirmed that the stock never sold for $36.25 per share.

I did a bit more research and discovered that Univision Communications, Inc. used to have the symbol UVN on the New York Stock Exchange and Perenchio had headed Univision. Univision was taken over in a private equity deal in March at $36.25 per share.

But what about Bill Gates? Did he own shares in Univision? The answer is Yes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sold 100,000 shares of Univision stock on December 18.

So that explains it. It wasn't some scam artist trying to promote the price of the stock by attaching famous names. But the moral to the story is: If it sounds too good to be true, check out the facts.

Please note: By the time you read this, the Insider pages at Yahoo Finance may have already changed, since Uravan is now working on getting it corrected.