NEW YORK
The jury selection for Trevor Milton’s fraud trial in federal court in Manhattan will begin on Monday.Milton is the founder and former CEO of Nikola Corp. Prosecutors say he lied to investors about the company’s electric and hydrogen-powered trucks.
Prosecutors say Milton tried to trick investors about the technology of the company starting in November 2019. In September 2020, he left the company after a report from short seller Hindenburg Research called it a “fraud.”
Milton, age 40, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. His lawyers say they will argue that Milton didn’t mean to trick investors and that other top executives at Nikola, including the company’s general counsel, agreed with what Milton said.
Last year, Milton was put on trial. Prosecutors said he lied about Nikola’s progress on developing its technology as the company joined the growing number of tech and electric vehicle companies going public through special purpose acquisition vehicles, or SPACs.
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Prosecutors said Milton said things that were not true, like that Nikola had built an electric and hydrogen-powered “Badger” pickup “from the ground up,” made batteries in-house that he knew Nikola bought elsewhere, and had early success making a “Nikola One” semi-truck that he knew did not work.
People said that Milton’s comments on social media and in podcasts were aimed at small investors who bought a lot of stocks when the stock market was closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Milton is also accused of cheating the seller of a Utah ranch, who said in a civil lawsuit that he accepted Nikola stock options as part of the purchase price based on the former CEO’s claims about the company.
According to public documents, Nikola has already spent more than $20 million on Milton’s legal defence.
In June 2020, the company went public by merging with VectoIQ Acquisition Corp. Nikola was worth more than $33 billion on the market that month, but it is now worth less than $3 billion.
In December, Nikola agreed to pay $125 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says the company cheated investors by lying to them about its products, technical advances, and business prospects.
