Bill Ackman is not backing down on his Herbalife fight — no matter how bruising the battle gets.
“I will go to the ends of the earth to shut this company down,” he said.
Ackman launched another take down of the controversial nutrition products company Friday at the Robin Hood Investors Conference, where he reiterated his belief that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme.
Wall Street was unimpressed, sending the stock up 4.7 percent to close at $71.65. Ackman, who has been calling on regulators to investigate Herbalife, didn’t drop a regulatory bombshell, contributing to the stock rally.
His appearance at the conference marked his first public presentation since announcing his $1 billion short on Herbalife and setting a price target of zero almost a year ago.
Several heavyweight hedge fund managers, most notably his arch-nemesis Carl Icahn, have gone long on the stock, which is up 83 percent since Ackman disclosed his short. Ackman said he has booked paper losses of as much as $500 million on his Herbalife bet.
At the conference, Ackman turn the focus away from the hedge fund battle to those who he said have lost money with Herbalife.
“There’s too much about Wall Street and not enough about the victims,” Ackman told The Post after his talk Friday morning.
Calling it “Robin Hood in Reverse,” Ackman brought a Hispanic community organizer onto the stage to show a short video on four local women who told their stories of loss after getting involved with Herbalife
Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director of Make the Road New York — which is funded by the Robin Hood philanthropy — said the group has surveyed 500 local residents in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island and none of them “made a single dollar and may have lost thousands” in their involvement with Herbalife.
Ackman told The Post he chose Make the Road New York because of its connection to Robin Hood and because it is working to protect immigrants. This group and others have criticized Herbalife for targeting low-income people, in particular Hispanics.
“A lot of the people who have been hurt by Herbalife are not in a position to defend themselves,” he told the audience at Friday’s conference.
In an interview after his presentation, Ackman said his firm Pershing Square has stories of more than 200 victims who have been given to a number of regulators, including eight attorneys generals, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, among others.
Ackman has hired what he called “an army” of people to investigate the company in several countries, including six law firms. He has also been talking with several members of both houses of Congress.
Although Ackman had no regulatory bombshell to present, he seemed most keen on the SEC, noting they had a history of shutting down pyramid schemes and had just closed one.
The hedge fund activist used a recent Securities and Exchange Commission advisory on pyramid schemes to illustrate — by video clips of Herbalife executives like Michael Johnson and top distributors — how he believes Herbalife fits all seven characteristics of what the SEC deems a pyramid scheme.
The lack of documented retail sales is one Ackman focused on. In its recent advisory, the SEC suggested investors ask for audited retail sales data, which Herbalife does not provide, to show that sales people make money from outsiders, not just those in the program.
Ackman offered to help subsidize the cost of hiring an independent audit of two years of retail sales data from Herbalife’s independent distributors sales forms and turn that over to regulators.
“Mr. Ackman presented nothing new today,” Herbalife said in a statement. “After a year of baseless claims about Herbalife and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for his investors, the only thing Mr. Ackman has proven with his obsessive, ego-driven investing decisions is his lack of understanding of consumer product companies.”