Hometown Deli, Paulsboro, N.J.
Mike Calia | CNBC
The shell company E-Waste Corp. on Monday disavowed its own sky-high stock market valuation of $106 million, three days after an identical move by the mysterious corporation that owns just a single New Jersey deli.
The deli company, Hometown International, has multiple connections to E-Waste, which has no actual business operations. Both companies have a market capitalization of about $100 million.
The back-to-back disavowals of their respective market caps in Securities and Exchange Commission filings came after more than two weeks of articles by CNBC detailing legal and regulatory issues surrounding people and entities connected to Hometown International and E-Waste.
They also come as a Hong Kong-based firm, Maso Capital, continues trying to position both companies as vehicles for acquisition by privately held companies to become publicly traded on U.S. stock markets.
Last week, both Hometown International and E-Waste on the same day killed consulting agreements with a North Carolina firm controlled by the father of Hometown’s chairman, moves which were praised by Maso Capital’s founder, Manoj Jain.
In its filing Monday with the SEC, the management of E-Waste said it “disavows the price of its publicly quoted stock on the OTC Markets under the trading symbol ‘EWST.'”
“Management is aware of no basis to support the Company’s stock price, based upon its revenue or assets,” the filing said.
The filing was signed by E-Waste President John Rollo, whose company in November declared a net loss of almost $58,000 for the prior nine months.
A Grammy Award-winning recording engineeer, the 66-year-old Rollo last year was working as a patient transporter in a New Jersey hospital, according to another recent E-Waste financial.
E-Waste’s stock price closed at $8.50 per share on Monday, with no trades recorded on the Pink market, according to OTC Markets Group. With 12.5 million shares outstanding, E-Waste has a market capitalization of $106.25 million.
Hometown International stock, which also trades on the Pink market, closed at $13.40 per share, with just 2,866 out of the nearly 7.8 million common shares outstanding changing hands in trading.
That stock price gives the company a market cap of $97.85 million, which is many times greater than the just $35,000 or so in combined sales of its Hometown Deli in Paulsboro, New Jersey, in the past two years combined.
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