“Statement Regarding SPAC Matter,” is the latest from SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. Seems completely anodyne, doesn’t it? But, as they say, looks can be deceiving. Instead, it’s a withering criticism of the SEC’s failure to declare a SPAC registration statement effective in time to allow a de-SPAC merger to go forward, implicitly suggesting at the end that the SEC may have displayed a lack of good faith in its Kafkaesque process (her metaphor, not mine), which had the effect of stringing the registrant along for many months until it was too late to go forward and liquidation was the only possible result. Peirce presumes the failure to declare effectiveness was based on the SEC’s “newfound hostility to SPAC capital formation.” Of course, as none of the correspondence with the SEC has been posted, we really have no independent information about what happened or precisely why the registration statement was not declared effective; it’s certainly possible that the deal was more thorny than the norm. Peirce calls SEC “inaction on a request for acceleration of the effective date of a registration statement…highly unusual.” But then, so is her statement.
To learn more about this statement, please see the recent post on Cooley PubCo.
