From page one of Markopolos' presentation:

> [...] members of the Company are personally in possession of securities, derivatives, and/or other financial instruments of, and correlating to, GE, which may generate profits should the price of GE securities decrease

To be clear: I think Markopolos is on to something here, and the presentation does a pretty good job of showing how GE is sitting on some really really bad news for its investors. But yeah, he's definitely shorting GE personally in addition to whatever he's getting from the sponsor.

And there's nothing wrong with that! This is the whole point of having public securities markets!

Seems like a lot less risk to pay analysts to find possible frauds, and then short them while disclosing what they found.

The Netflix series "Dirty Money" introduced me to this concept, episode 3 "Drug Short" covers the analysts who called out Valeant Pharmaceuticals and took a pay day for their hard work through shorting the stock. Really I found it inspirational :)

Regardless of whether this is true, should they successfully collect a reward, it would validate the research on merits.