FOIAengine: How Obscure MMTLP Became a Cause Célèbre
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, the inbox has been filling up with hundreds of near-identical Freedom of Information Act requests about a little-known company called Meta Materials, Inc., whose stock once traded under the ticker symbol MMTLP.
Most of those FOIA requests aren’t signed by big law firms or Wall Street players, but rather by aggrieved retail investors and citizen activists who buy into a conspiracy theory: that actions taken by the SEC and its self-regulatory arm, FINRA, in the interest of protecting investors actually constituted regulatory missteps that wiped out their investments.
There have been lawsuits, bankruptcies, death threats, and calls for Congress or the Trump Administration to take action. In one anonymous message to a market veteran reported by the Wall Street Journal, the sender alluded to mass shootings and vowed to come “piss on your casket.”
Big financial players – notably Citadel, and the online market maker Virtu – have been targeted and are fighting subpoenas. FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that writes and enforces rules for registered brokers and broker-dealer firms in the U.S., also has been pulled into litigation. The hashtag #FinraFraud went viral.
On social media, the MMTLP saga never really went quiet – it looped. Investor forums and X accounts kept churning out timelines, clip-and-save “FOIA wins,” and redacted email dumps. Social media posts layered on commentary and speculation that framed each drip of disclosure as proof there was more to find. Those posts then ricocheted around, amplified by charts, hashtag campaigns, and influencer threads that prompted fresh waves of template FOIA filings that produced more documents, more debates, and more viral posts.
The result was a self-reinforcing feedback loop: online chatter fueled new FOIA requests. New records, however partial, rekindled the chatter this past summer.
The latest swarm of FOIA requests is central to this story, because it is one of the most striking grassroots FOIA campaigns in recent memory, with ordinary people filing thousands of federal open-records requests – nearly 400 in the past month alone – to press regulators on what they see as a botched stock conversion and trading halt.
The SEC views things very differently. The agency says the true conspirators were the two corporate CEOs, John Brda and Georges Palikaras, who concocted a complicated scheme to defraud as many as 64,000 investors. Fraud charges against the duo are pending in Texas federal court.
Here’s what started the FOIA campaign: MMTLP was a preferred share that vanished from the over-the-counter market in December 2022 after regulators halted trading and the issuer cancelled the shares. What might have been a footnote in the arcana of corporate actions instead became a cause célèbre for retail investors, who suspect regulatory missteps. (All but two of the hundreds of the most recent batch of FOIA requests targeted the SEC.)
So far, the FOIA results have been mixed. Regulators have dribbled out heavily redacted documents, courts have tossed some of the lawsuits, and no agency has admitted wrongdoing. But the sheer volume of filings – nearly all focused on a single ticker – shows how a loosely organized band of small investors can bend the machinery of government transparency to their cause, keeping alive a dispute Wall Street would rather forget.
When a Bloomberg columnist explained the MMTLP controversy last year, he showed how convoluted the whole affair has become. “One of the leading financial conspiracy theories of recent years is MMTLP,” began the column by Matt Levine, a Wall Street lawyer and former Goldman Sachs banker. “I am not sure I can explain the theory very clearly, because it is the nature of conspiracy theories to be sprawling and slippery, but the central idea is that short sellers ganged up on a public company, and stock exchanges and regulators took the side of the short sellers at the expense of ordinary shareholders.”
Well, here we go. The short sellers are at it again – but this time, the conspiracy goes, the SEC and FINRA aided and abetted them.
The explanation gets complicated from here – very complicated. Levine, Bloomberg’s expert, unwinds it in his 3,100-word tour-de-force of a column that must be read (and, ideally, re-read) to fully appreciate just how complex the alleged conspiracy was. And, at the end of it, even Levine – with tongue firmly implanted in cheek – wasn’t sure he got it completely right.
It could be, Levine concluded, that the two CEOs that the SEC charged with fraud – Brda and Palikaras – are “just as cynical as can be, tricking people into believing that the public markets are rigged against them by shadowy short sellers, in order to take their money [themselves]. Or, of course, all of this is wrong, and the SEC is in on the conspiracy too. Always possible.”
Last week, the Trump-appointed judge in the SEC’s fraud case put that matter on hold – which only added more fuel to the conspiracy theories. A legal commentator who’s been reading the tea leaves about MMTLP called the stay a win for investors, giving them more time “to organize and advocate for their interests” – and, presumably, to file more FOIA requests to finally expose “the bad actors within the MMTLP scandal.”
To see all the requests mentioned in this article, log in or sign up to become a FOIAengine user.
Next: The latest hedge fund requests to the FDA, FTC, and SEC.
FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across over 40 federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. Learn more about FOIAengine here. Sign up here to become a trial user of FOIAengine.
PoliScio now offers everyone free daily FOIAengine Email Alerts when a new FOIA request matches one of your personal keywords. Sign up here to create your account and identify your keywords.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His next book, Summer of ’71, about events before Watergate, will be published in May 2026. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.
