1) US securities laws are very focused on disclosure and filling out the correct forms. Hertz did say the stock was (likely) worthless when they filled out the correct form to sell some stock.
2) People were buying (and selling) Hertz stock every day, before, during, and after Hertz's brief offering. If it should be illegal for Hertz to sell the stock, why should it be legal for anyone else to sell the stock? (The obvious reason is "well, what if Hertz had information nobody else did?", but in this case, they didn't. And they were required to disclose that they didn't.) In a pretty real sense, the victims of Hertz selling stock is not the people who bought it (they would have done so regardless), but the other sellers who might have lost out on a sale (or more likely, made the sale, but for a fraction of a penny less than they otherwise would have done) to a sucker who ended up buying from Hertz instead. And it's hard to feel too sorry for people offloading worthless stock to suckers, no?
(Of course, note that nobody who bought the stock from Hertz will have seen those disclosures. It was an at the money offering; the purchasers won't have any idea who they bought their shares from or how old those shares were. But again, US securities law is extremely focused on disclosure to the exclusion of all else...even if the disclosure won't be seen by anyone.)
2) People were buying (and selling) Hertz stock every day, before, during, and after Hertz's brief offering. If it should be illegal for Hertz to sell the stock, why should it be legal for anyone else to sell the stock? (The obvious reason is "well, what if Hertz had information nobody else did?", but in this case, they didn't. And they were required to disclose that they didn't.) In a pretty real sense, the victims of Hertz selling stock is not the people who bought it (they would have done so regardless), but the other sellers who might have lost out on a sale (or more likely, made the sale, but for a fraction of a penny less than they otherwise would have done) to a sucker who ended up buying from Hertz instead. And it's hard to feel too sorry for people offloading worthless stock to suckers, no?
(Of course, note that nobody who bought the stock from Hertz will have seen those disclosures. It was an at the money offering; the purchasers won't have any idea who they bought their shares from or how old those shares were. But again, US securities law is extremely focused on disclosure to the exclusion of all else...even if the disclosure won't be seen by anyone.)