Shares of electrical car start-up Lordstown Motors tumbled by as a lot as 12% throughout intraday buying and selling Thursday morning after the corporate confirmed the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee has requested info relating to claims by a short-seller that it misled traders.

Hindenburg Analysis accused Lordstown in a report final week of using “fake” orders to lift capital for its first product, an all-electric pickup truck known as the Endurance. The short-seller claimed the pickup was years away from manufacturing, nevertheless Lordstown maintains it is on observe to begin producing the car in September.

Lordstown CEO Steve Burns declined to touch upon the SEC inquiry Thursday morning to CNBC. He advised traders through the firm’s first earnings name as a public firm Wednesday that it was “cooperating” with federal officers.

Burns stated the corporate’s highly-touted pre-orders of greater than 100,000 pickups — a foremost goal of the Hindenburg report — had been merely meant to gauge buyer curiosity, to not affirm future gross sales. The corporate beforehand categorized the pre-orders as “non-binding manufacturing reservations” as effectively, however Burns additionally has referred to them as “very severe orders.”

“We have at all times been very clear, proper? These are simply what they’re supposed to be. These are non-binding, letters of intent. They’re known as pre-orders out in the actual world,” he stated Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He later added, “I do not assume anybody thought that we had precise orders, proper? That is simply not the character of this enterprise.”

Shares of Lordstown have tumbled by about 24% since Hindenburg launched the report Friday. The inventory was down by about 10% throughout intraday buying and selling Thursday morning. The corporate’s market cap is $2.3 billion.

The corporate on Wednesday additionally elevated its steerage on capital and operational bills for this 12 months, largely citing choices to speed up the event of its second product (a van) and do extra in home manufacturing.

Lordstown went public via a particular objective acquisition firm, or SPAC, in October. It’s amongst a rising group of electrical car start-ups going public via offers with SPACs, which have turn into a preferred manner of elevating cash on Wall Road as a result of they’ve a extra streamlined regulatory course of than conventional preliminary public choices.

Hindenburg’s report on Lordstown comes about six months after it launched a scathing report relating to one other EV-SPAC start-up Nikola. That report additionally led to federal inquires in addition to the resignation of the corporate’s founder and chairman, Trevor Milton.

Brief promoting is when traders, largely skilled hedge fund managers, borrow shares of a inventory from a dealer and promote them within the hope of shopping for them again cheaper. If the inventory drops, the traders make a revenue off the distinction after they return the shares to the dealer.