While waiting for the announcement, there's a fortnight's worth...

While waiting for the announcement, there's a fortnight's worth of time to brush up our knowledge of, and to defend our portfolios from, the ploys of the manipulators.
What's explained in the extracts below were already witnessed over the last week to the buy/sell orders of ARL shares.
Well, now we can place a name to the actions of perpetrators.

From Investopedia:
Manipulation is more difficult for the more liquid, or widely traded securities. It is much easier to manipulate a penny stock with a tiny typical daily trading volume than the share price of a large-cap company with daily turnover valued in billions of dollars.

The pump-and-dump is a market manipulation often used to artificially inflate the price of a microcap stock before selling it.

Less common is the inverse poop-and-scoop scheme, in which false derogatory statements are made about a stock in order to buy it on the cheap.

There's also the short-and-distort variety, essentially a poop-and-scoop executed by short-sellers in order to profit.

While such schemes rely primarily on promotion or factual misstatements they are often supplemented by illegal trading tactics designed to deceive.

One common means is order spoofing, which involves the placing of numerous buy or sell orders designed to move the price of the stock, then canceling them once other traders have moved their own bids or asks accordingly.

Order spoofing has tempted staff at large Wall Street firms alongside shady daytraders, and can take place in the bond and metals markets as well as in the stock market.

From Benjamin Nahum (2022):
Spoofing is a market abuse behavior where a trader moves the price of a financial instrument up or down by placing a large buy or sell order with no intention of executing it, thus creating the impression of market interest in that instrument.

Once the price has shifted in the Spoofing trader’s intended direction, they cancel the original order and place a new order to take advantage of the favorable price movement. 

Layering is a specific form of Spoofing where the individual places multiple orders at defined price levels (layers) to give an impression of market liquidity. The orders are not intended to be executed and will be canceled once the price has moved to a favorable place and a real order has been placed on the other side.

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