INCREDIBLE: Now, A ‘Nuclear Power’ Fraud Scheme; SEC Suspends Trading Of Alternate Energy Holdings Inc. (AEHI) Stock And Seeks Emergency Asset Freeze

The SEC has suspended trading of Alternate Energy Holdings Inc. (AEHI) stock and gone to federal court in Idaho to seek an emergency asset freeze, the agency said.

AEHI was manipulating its stock price with a blitz of press releases while CEO Donald L. Gillispie and Senior Vice President Jennifer Ransom were reaping secret profits, the SEC charged.

The agency said the firm was a “self-described Idaho nuclear power company” that “has essentially no revenue and minimal operations.”

Despite this, the agency said, Gillispie, 67, channeled money from secret stock sales to fund “lavish personal expenses such as his Maserati sports car.”

Among the bogus claims to suck in millions of dollars from investors in the United States and Asia was a claim that no company officer had sold any stock.

In reality, the SEC charged, Ransom, 36, had “sold at least one million shares. She hid her stock sales from AEHI investors and the public, failing to file forms notifying the Commission of her sales. In addition, Gillispie himself directed sales of more than one million shares of AEHI stock through nominees, thereby hiding from the public his conduct.”

Some of the money funded the Maserati purchase, the SEC charged.

“In light of AEHI’s ongoing efforts to raise funding while promoting itself through a daily deluge of press releases, we needed to take immediate action to get to the bottom of the company’s misleading statements,” said Marc Fagel, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office. “Documents we have obtained to date indicate a scheme to personally enrich the CEO at the expense of investors.”

Court documents allege that AEHI positioned itself as an upstart in 2006 that sought to raise $10 billion for the construction of a nuclear-power plant in Payette County, Idaho.  The company also pitched ventures that included the purported harvesting of lightning from thunder storms, the development of fuel additives and the use of “nuclear-powered desalination reactors to provide the third world with clean water,” the SEC charged.

Efforts to pump the stock began four years ago, but the firm “has no realistic possibility of building a multi-billion dollar nuclear reactor,” the SEC charged. “AEHI has never had any revenue or product.”

Read the SEC complaint.