SEC Suspends Trading of 26 Microcaps

In its effort to better police microcap securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended the trading of 26 companies for "corporate hijacking."Hijacking refers to when someone seizes the identity of a defunct publicly traded corporation. The SEC said that the incident involved certain people incorporating each of the 26 companies using the same name as a then-defunct or inactive publicly traded corporation.Under trading rules, each class of an issuer's publicly-traded securities is assigned a ticker symbol by Nasdaq Reorganization and a CUSIP number by the Standard & Poor's CUSIP Bureau. The commission said the same persons appear to have usurped the CUSIP numbers and ticker symbols assigned to the defunct or inactive corporations' publicly traded securities for use by the newly incorporated entities.The regulator said the suspensions are first actions under the SEC's Enforcement Division's recently formed Microcap Fraud Working Group. The trading suspensions will last until March 27.