Citron Research took to Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) on Monday to skewer cannabidiol (CBD) company, CV Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB: CVSI). The tweet alleges that the company is being misrepresented by the management team, which never disclosed its patents being rejected.
Citron further asserts that the company was continuing to be hyped despite the rejected patents. The tweet sent shares of CV Sciences down over 36% on volume of 29.79 million shares, which represents ten times normal average daily volume over the past month.
Along with the tweet were two pictures detailing of the alleged rejected patent. The patent in question was originally filed on February 7, 2017 and was seeking protection for the “pharmaceutical formulations containing cannabidiol and nicotine for treating smokeless tobacco addiction.” The U.S. patent application publication was dated November 16, 2017 for CV Sciences, Inc. and names Jonnie Williams as the inventor of the intellectual property.
On the second image from the Citron tweet, it shows a transaction history report from the U.S. patent application retrieval system. The transaction history for the CV Sciences patent application shows between January 2017 and June 2018, the company was engaged in a number of transactions with U.S. patent division. Specifically, the data provided shows the latest appeal filed was in June 2018, despite the fact that a “final rejection” decision was made by the government in December 2017.
CV Sciences has not issued a response thus far and has not tweeted from the official corporate account since August 17th. It is likely that we will get a response of some kind from the management team, which will look to calm the selling that took over a third of CBD company’s market value in Monday’s trading alone. Citron has not published an official report on CV Sciences or provided further details at this point.
Citron Research is a respected market research company that generally focuses on exposing overvalued companies or that are engaged in fraudulent activities. Founder and Executive Editor Andrew Left has made a name for himself over Citron’s 17-year track record.
