GameStop’s chief financial officer is stepping down from his role, weeks after the company was involved in a trading frenzy.
The company announced that Jim Bell, the executive vice president and chief financial officer, will be resigning from his roles on March 26.
THE GAMESTOP SHORT SQUEEZE
GameStop has hired a search firm to help support the process of finding his replacement and will be looking internally and externally to do so. If a replacement is not found before Bell’s last day, GameStop plans to appoint Diana Jajeh, the current senior vice president and chief accounting officer, to the role of interim chief financial officer.
The announcement comes a month after the company’s stock soared, fueled by the Reddit page WallStreetBets.
In early January, GameStop had a larger short interest, or the number of shares involved in short positions, than the company’s total number of shares. The thousand-fold price increase badly hurt firms that relied on risky short positions for big payoffs. Melvin Capital Management lost more than 50% on its investments in January, according to the Wall Street Journal, losses fueled predominantly by GameStop’s surge.
The frenzy led to hearings on Capitol Hill.
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Keith Gill, one of the most well-known Reddit users involved in the GameStop stock surge who branded himself as a “hobby” investor, was hit with a class-action lawsuit accusing him of deception and market manipulation. Gill was an active contributor to the WallStreetBets thread, in which he frequently encouraged users to buy shares of GameStop.