The 'Batman of Wall Street' after the attack on Grifols, summoned by the National Court

BarcelonaThe messages that the Gotham City Research short fund published on January 8 and 9, 2024, and which assured that Grifols shares were worth zero euros, caused the Catalan pharmaceutical company to suffer a capitalization loss of 3.814 billion euros. Now, a year and a half after that stock market crash, the judge of the National Court admitted a complaint against the analysis firm Gotham City and several of its directors for allegedly having released biased and misleading financial information to the market in order to lower the share price of the Catalan pharmaceutical company Grifo's New York, which is dedicated to making money when the value of its assets falls.

These are the manager of Gotham, Daniel Yu, and the manager of General Industrial Partners (GIP), Cyrus de Weck, a limited company registered in England and Wales, who allegedly coordinates with Yu to take short positions that allow GIP to benefit from the reports prepared by Gotham. The head of Gotham, who defines himself as Batman of Wall Street, has previously been charged with various serious crimes – as reported by Grifols in an 80-page report which he filed in a New York court. Now the judge of the National Court, according to the order to which ARA has had access, summons him to testify on February 26, 2026 as a suspect, along with De Weck, for an alleged crime related to the market, classified in the Spanish Penal Code in article 284, which punishes the dissemination of preserving the listed price of a financial instrument.

In November, this same judge recorded that GIP held a "short" position in Grifols, greater than 0.5% of the share capital; position that, after the publication of the Gotham report, was reduced to 0.06%. "Short" trading involves selling shares that one does not own and that have been borrowed to sell advantageously, having subsequently bought in order to return the borrowed shares, explained the November order.

This judicial advance is not the only one that the Catalan pharmaceutical company based in Parets del Vallès. In May, the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected Gotham's request to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the Catalan multinational blood products company. However, the blood products company was penalized by the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), which opened a file in September 2024 for its financial information and resolved a sanction this August against Grifols for providing regulated financial information with inaccurate or untrue data" in the financial reports for 2021, 2022 and 2023, and in the consolidated financial information corresponding to the first half of 2023. The corresponding fine was 1.