A June 28 article on The Daily Beast reported that former baseball star Lenny Dykstra, a top protege of CNBC’s Jim Cramer, was secretly paid by a public company, AVT, to plug stocks on TheStreet.com and provide access to Cramer. The article said the form of payment was $250,000 in stock—via shares issued in the name of Dykstra’s brother-in-law, Keith Peel.
When contacted before publication of the article, Shannon Illingworth, AVT’s founder, denied paying Dykstra or Peel in shares, and also denied that Peel did work for AVT. In subsequent correspondence with The Daily Beast, AVT has confirmed that the shares were in fact issued to Peel—it now says these shares were canceled within a few weeks, on April 9, 2008. The company did not say why Dykstra’s brother-in-law was issued stock, or what caused it to cancel the shares.
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