The fledgling electric truck manufacturer Nikola agreed to pay $125 million to settle an investigation into allegations that the company and its founder had defrauded investors by making misleading claims about its products and technology, securities regulators said on Tuesday.
Nikola is settling the case, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, nearly five months after federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Trevor Milton, the company’s founder and former chief executive, who has pleaded not guilty. The S.E.C. also filed civil fraud charges against Mr. Milton.
“Nikola Corporation is responsible both for Milton’s allegedly misleading statements and for other alleged deceptions, all of which falsely portrayed the true state of the company’s business and technology,” Gurbir Grewal, director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, said in a statement.
The S.E.C., in a civil order resolving the investigation, found that Mr. Milton embarked on a campaign on Twitter and in news releases to pump up the price of Nikola’s shares with a series of misleading statements. The regulator said Nikola compounded that by making its own misleading statements about the refueling times for its planned products.
The company, which neither admitted nor denied the allegations in the civil order, said in a statement: “We are pleased to bring this chapter to a close as the company has now resolved all government investigations.”
The S.E.C. said Nikola was continuing to cooperate with...
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