The Lake Resources N.L. (ASX: LKE) share price is trading lower on Tuesday afternoon.
At the time of writing, the lithium developer's shares are down 2% to 92 cents.
This means the Lake Resources share price has now fallen almost 13% since this time last week.
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Why is the Lake Resources share price falling?
The weakness in the Lake Resources share price on Tuesday could have been driven by a flurry of tweets from a short seller prior to the company's annual general meeting this morning.
Research firm J Capital is currently shorting the lithium share partly on the belief that Lake's DLE technology isn't going to work as planned and will "still use large amounts of water and produce toxic waste."
Its analysts also recently alleged that an announcement regarding potential funding from the UK Export Finance (UKEF) was not all it seemed. The research firm commented:
We made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) application to the UK government to verify Lake Resources' (Lake) claim that it has "confirmed" funding from UK Export Finance (UKEF). These documents seem to reveal that Lake has made statements that are incorrect about the expression of interest (EOI) from UKEF. UKEF says that Lake is just at the start of the application process.
Last night, J Capital posed a series of questions for Lake to answer at the annual general meeting.
The majority related to doubts over the DLE demonstration plant's performance, the UKEF funding, and proposed offtake agreements with Hanwa and Ford. In respect to the latter, its analysts highlight that Hanwa and Ford no longer feature in presentations. They also don't feature in today's annual general meeting presentation.
No response
Lake's chair, Stuart Crown, didn't acknowledge J Capital's tweets in his annual general meeting address. He just focused on the future and reiterated his belief that the future is bright for Lake. Crow commented:
The year ahead, whilst challenging, I suspect will be the company's most formative year yet as we move toward financing and construction phase of the Kachi project and continued development of other projects. I look to the coming year with great anticipation and pride as a founding shareholder as your company strives to become one of the world's significant suppliers of high purity lithium products.
