Shopping.com Broker Waldron Out of Business

Waldron & Co. Inc., the Irvine brokerage house accused of inflating the shares of troubled online retailer Shopping.com, has lost its regulatory registration and closed its doors.

The National Assn. of Securities Dealers suspended the company’s registration last week after it failed to pay $350,000 in compensatory damages in connection with the artificial boosting of the Corona del Mar-based company’s share price.

Company officials couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday.

Waldron’s offices in Irvine are empty, except for a court summons resting on a lone desk, filed by property landlords seeking unpaid rent.

“The company closed about a month ago,” said H. Thomas Fehn, attorney for Waldron and its former president, Cery Perle. “It ran out of money.”

Waldron is owned by Aubry Perle Holdings, Fehn said. Three men--Perle, Ed Harris and Jon Aubry--own stock in the holding company, whose address is Waldron’s now-vacant Irvine offices.

Perle could not be reached for comment. Harris declined to comment. Aubry, contacted at a residence in Fort Worth, Texas, denied being involved with Waldron.

A lack of funds hasn’t stopped the flow of litigation and arbitration claims against the one-time brokerage firm.

At least four civil suits have been filed against Waldron and Perle in Superior Court in Santa Ana. And at least one former employee claims he is owed thousands of dollars in back pay, and says he is in the process of filing an arbitration complaint with the NASD.

“I generated $17,000” in commissions, said John Davidson, a broker who joined Waldron in July. “There was a day-to-day diet of ‘We’re getting this fixed up.’ Behind the scenes, people started worrying about payroll.”

Davidson acknowledged that he may have difficulty pursuing his claim, considering that the firm hasn’t met its earlier obligations to the NASD.

In September, regulators charged that Waldron, Perle and Harris were responsible for inflating Shopping.com’s stock price 255%, from its initial offering of $9 to more than $32 a share.

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the firm of manipulating the price by parking Shopping.com shares in fictitious customer accounts and restricting clients from selling shares. Additionally, the SEC alleged that at one point, Waldron controlled more than 90% of the company’s 1.3 million publicly traded shares.

The company has denied these charges.

The SEC also accused Waldron of issuing false and misleading news releases designed to inflate Shopping.com’s share price, and pointed to a March 12 statement that touted the company’s growth potential while not revealing that Waldron was the company’s single largest customer.

Fehn has denied that Waldron was ever Shopping.com’s largest customer, with the exception of a one-time order that Waldron had placed before taking the company public.

In connection with that suit, the NASD ordered brokerages that sold Shopping.com stock--including Waldron and Los Angeles-based Wedbush, Morgan Securities--to pay compensatory damages.