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CEO Allen Chan tells The Globe he’s “angry, stunned and frustrated,” which is the least he could say given that his investors have just lost a couple of billion. Still, the company hasn’t sued Muddy Waters. Still, insiders aren’t buying, or don’t appear to be. And still, it refuses to name its customers – the ones who buy the forests Sino sits on for two or three years before unloading them for huge profits.

Revealing customers, the CFO says, is “like putting up a little flag and saying ‘everybody come here.’ If we disclose our customers we are saying ‘everybody come here and sell to our customers.’ That is important information for someone to replicate what we are doing.”

Sino must have the dumbest customers in the world if they haven’t figured out that they should shop around.

I presume that’s why the company is reluctant to sue a little research firm that can’t even get its facts straight. Doing so would mean Sino would have to answer all these questions, and that just wouldn’t be good for business, one way or another.

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Muddy Waters couldn’t have gotten it more wrong. The research firms thinks Sino-Forest is in the business of logging, whereas a quick look at the company’s annual information form shows that it’s in the business of trading standing forests – i.e. live trees.

A lynchpin of Muddy Waters’ argument is that Sino lies about its revenues because there’s no way it could physically move that much lumber using the roads in and out of its plantations, which Muddy Waters claims to have visited. Since it got that fact wrong, its argument that Sino is a fraud looks very weak indeed. There’s not much more smoke in the report besides that.

So why doesn’t this news send the stock roaring back? It rose as much as 63% today only to close up a measly 17%, meaning it’s still only about a quarter of where it was a month ago. And why doesn’t Sino sue Muddy Waters to shut them up? The company may yet do this but normally a firm under unfair attack would do so immediately. Instead it appoints a committee of its own directors to investigate these allegations?

Highly suspicious.