Many of the retail shareholders have been expressing concern over the June 28th 2021 deadline and the September 28 cut-off date where all the company’s with a stop rank will get delisted from OTC markets?
This is simply not so. The sky will not fall on September 28th 2021 and no companies will be deleted from otcmarkets. What will happen is that companies which are not subscribing to the OTC markets platform meaning they are not paying the $6,000 a year subscription fee OTC markets will stop displaying level 1 start quotations on their stock symbols only on the OTCmarkets.com website.
A retail shareholder can still go to many other websites such as Yahoo google finance Bloomberg and others which provide free level 1 quotations and the retail shareholders can obtain the stock price there.
The SEC has also passed a rule where a company can simply maintain a website and issue periodic press releases advising their followers to visit the website and they can post all of their financials and all relevant information on their corporate website. The company can also do so even though it is not a reporting company file and 8k of any material event with the SEC as a volunteer filer. We have been doing this for years with many of our clients who are on a limited budget that wish to keep their shareholders advised of the status in any material event change.
Obviously, OTC markets being a for-profit company ( and also quoted on otc markets) their interest is to have all the issuers subscribe to their platform and to provide a centralized platform for shareholders to gather information rather than maintaining it on different corporate websites. Obviously, if the company does not pay the annual fee to participate in OTC markets subscription then OTC markets will denote them in default. In other words, no level 1 quotation will be provided and there will be some creative language posted (similar to when the STOP sign is displayed) to induce the company to subscribe to the OTC market services.
So even if your company in which you are invested in, misses September 28th deadline and are noted as expert Market and some ugly icon is placed on otc markets, in addition to the stop sign … all the company will have to do, to remedy this is to subscribe to OTC markets and pay the required fee of about $6000 per year.
Now there is a new SEC rule coming out which is aimed at killing off dormant shells. In summary, the company will have 18 months to get get some business going in a shell or it will be sanctioned. This SEC rule has absolutely nothing to do with the OTC markets stopping the level 1 quotation on companies that do not pay their fee.
