SEC Charges Agria Corporation and Executive Chairman With Fraud

A multinational agricultural company has agreed to pay $3 million to settle charges that it concealed substantial losses from investors through fraudulent accounting in connection with its divestiture of its primary operating entity. In a related action, the company’s executive chairman Lai Guanglin (aka Alan Lai) settled charges that he manipulated the company’s share price. As described in the SEC’s order, Agria Corporation sold its Chinese operating company in return for stock and land use rights to 13,500 acres of undeveloped land in a remote, mountainous area of China’s Shanxi Province. The SEC order found that Agria overstated the value of the stock it received by $17 million and assigned a value of nearly $60 million to the effectively worthless land use rights.