Golf Entertainment Is Mum to Investors on ASD Probe

The Arkansas Securities Department apparently moves a lot faster than Golf Entertainment Inc. of Springdale. The ASD’s Commissioner, Michael B. Johnson, announced an investigation of the penny-stock company on Aug. 29. You’d think that in the time it took the ASD to complete its investigation, Golf would have had time to file an 8-K letting the Securities and Exchange Commission and the investing public know that the company was the subject of a regulatory probe.

Apparently not.

On Sept. 10, Johnson ordered the company to stop selling stock in Arkansas. His department’s investigation found that Golf had issued 15 million shares of stock to an entity called the Genesis Trust, which Johnson said “purports to be a nonprofit association,” but had failed to either register the shares or get an exemption.

Neither the investigation nor the cease-and-desist order had been reported to the SEC by press time on Sept. 12.

Such “news event” disclosures are required by the SEC for any event that investors would consider “material” in their decision to purchase or sell a security. Your typical public company — which Golf certainly is not — would file an 8-K that either proclaims its innocence or offers to “cooperate fully” with regulators. Making no statement under these circumstances is certainly the exception and not the rule.

Golf, a penny stock now also doing business as Sienna Broadcasting Co., has a history of “unusual” SEC filing practices. Click here for the first in a series of stories the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and Arkansas Business has published on Golf.