Nov. 22 (UPI) — The special acquisition company set to merge with former President Donald Trump’s media firm Trump Media and Technology Group said Tuesday that its shareholders voted to delay a deadline for its merger by several months.
Digital World Acquisition Corp. had faced liquidation next month if it couldn’t get a deadline extension. The Securities and Exchange Commission and federal criminal investigators are probing the deal.
The company’s board of directors can now delay any merger until Sept. 8, 2023.
During a Q&A with IPO Edge on Tuesday, DWAC CEO Patrick Orlando said that it had been a difficult process to get the votes to delay the merger.
“It’s a really arduous process when you have as many stockholders as we did,” Orlando said. “Retail stockholders often don’t feel they need to participate.”
The special purpose acquisition vehicle has also been dealing with the fallout from a Trump Media executive’s whistleblower complaint to federal regulators.
William Wilkerson, a senior vice president of operations at Trump Media, alleged that there have been securities violations involving the merger in a whistleblower complaint filed with the SEC in August.
Wilkerson told the Miami Herald that he questions the future of Trump’s Truth Social platform, that “one way or another, this company is going to go bankrupt” and that the social media site has become an “echo chamber” for the former president.
According to CNBC, in September, the company said it lost $138.5 million of the $1 billion in financing from private investors in public equity, also known as PIPE, to fund the merger.
