Nature's Sunshine is delisted

Nature's Sunshine Products Inc. announced Tuesday that it will be delisted by the Nasdaq National Stock Market effective today.

The Provo-based nutritional supplement company said Tuesday it was not current in its reporting obligations under the U.S. Securities Exchange Act, having failed to file in a timely fashion its Form 10-Q quarterly report for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2005, and its Form 10-K annual report for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2005. It also reported that KPMG, its accounting firm, resigned on March 31, 2006.

Having determined that it would be unable to meet the deadline for further filing extensions, the company did not seek another extension and Nasdaq decided to delist.

Nature's Sunshine's common stock is not currently eligible to trade on the OTC Bulletin Board, the company said. Its stock could appear in the National Daily Quotations Journal ("pink sheets"). However, there are no assurances that the company's stock will be eligible for trading or quotation on any alternative exchanges or markets. The company said Tuesday it will disclose further trading information when such information becomes available.

In a related development, Standard & Poor's announced Tuesday that TradeStation Group Inc. would be added to the S&P SmallCap 600 index, replacing Nature's Sunshine. TradeStation, based in Plantation, Fla., operates an Internet-based securities brokerage for institutional, professional and active individual traders.

Nature's Sunshine announced in March that it was retracting four years of financial statements and warned that it faced possible government investigations and termination of senior officers.

The company said in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that a preliminary report of its audit committee — which was first assembled to investigate certain foreign operations but later expanded to include its general financial statements — found "certain internal control weaknesses and outlined potential violations of law." It did not elaborate on what those weaknesses were, or the potential legal violations.

Nature's Sunshine stock dropped $2.01, or 16.7 percent, to a 52-week low of $10.03 per share Tuesday on Nasdaq. The shares had been as high as $23.89 in the last year.