A senior Apple executive working on the technology giant’s electric-car efforts was sued by the SEC for allegedly breaking securities rules at his former company, the electric-vehicle startup Canoo, Bloomberg reports.
Ulrich Kranz, the former CEO of Canoo, and former Canoo CFO Paul Balciunas were sued in federal court in Los Angeles for allegedly providing unreasonable revenue projections. Kranz also was accused of misstating how much he was paid.
The two men no longer work at Canoo. Apple declined to comment, and Kranz couldn’t be reached immediately for comment. Balciunas’s current employer, Apex.AI, a maker of software for autonomous vehicles, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Balciunas.
The SEC is seeking to bar the pair from serving as officers at public companies, in addition to exacting fines from both of them. Canoo itself agreed in March to pay $1.5 million as part of a settlement of an SEC investigation into its 2020 SPAC merger.
The SEC initially began an investigation into the EV maker in May 2021, about five months after Canoo completed a merger with Hennessy Capital Acquisition IV.
The probe was reportedly broad, although Canoo at the time said the SEC characterized it as a “fact-finding inquiry,” and that the agency has not yet concluded whether anyone violated the law. It covers Canoo’s merger with Hennessy Capital Acquisition IV, completed in December 2020, plus its “operations, business model, revenues, revenue strategy, customer agreements, earnings and other related topics, along with the recent departures of certain of the company’s officers.” Read more.
