Kodak, the battered camera company, has regained prominence on Wall Street these days. Its stocks rose as much as 79% on Tuesday, then plummeted in a stock market frenzy that caused the same market to stop trading several times to curb volatility. In the background, the loan of 765 million dollars granted by the Donald Trump government to produce drugs during the pandemic and which has prompted an investigation by the Securities Market Commission (SEC).
On July 28, the Republican president presented his alliance with Eastman Kodak as a way to increase the production capacity of medicines in the middle of the pandemic and thus reduce its dependence on other countries. However, three weeks later, one of his advisers, Peter Navarro, criticized the CEO, James Continenza, and the rest of the company's executives.
"Based on what I am seeing, what happened at Kodak is one of the stupidest decisions made by executives in the history of corporations," he said Monday from the White House. "You can't fix something stupid. You can't even anticipate such a degree of stupidity." Navarro refers to Kodak's dealings with the loan to enter the pharmaceutical field after its debacle as a photographic products company. Kodak went from being the world leader in the industry to filing for bankruptcy in 2012 due to its inability to adapt to the digital market transition and the rise of smartphones.
The loan approved by Trump allowed Kodak securities to leave the stock market catacombs and live the best day in their history. In just two days they went from being worth 2 dollars to reaching 60 per share. Then the announcement of the SEC investigation caused them to plummet 53% in a week.
"We don't know why this happened or what they did," Navarro said about the investigation that he believes should continue. "Kodak is also doing an internal (investigation), but we are moving forward," convinced of the importance of accelerating drug production on US soil.
Suspicions are now focused on Continenza and the unusual volume of stock exchanges before the loan announcement was made public. "I can't say what triggered that volume of stock trading," he said. "This has been a very well kept secret until the last day."
For the Democrat Warren , "there were several cases of unusual commercial activity before the announcement, which raised questions about whether one or more people may have participated in the use of privileged information or in the unauthorized disclosure of material."
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