On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Ross issued a statement pushing back against the notion that he had nonpublic information about Navigator before he shorted its stock. He said the reporter who contacted him was writing “about my personal financial holdings and not about Navigator Holdings or its prospects,” and therefore it was not “market-moving information.”

However, the Oct. 26 letter from The Times clearly explained, in the first paragraph, that “the story focuses mostly on your involvement with Navigator Holdings.” It went on to include 10 questions related to Navigator, Mr. Ross’s relationship with the firm and its ties to Russia.

In a traditional short sale, investors borrow stock in the open market and sell it, hoping they can later replace the borrowed shares with new ones purchased at a lower price, pocketing the difference as profit. But in the case of Mr. Ross, he and his representatives insisted that making money was not the goal of his short sale, and it could not be determined if he did.

In a separate statement, Mr. Ross, 80, said he had been in the process of divesting his holdings in Navigator when he discovered shares he did not know he had in an account set up by the company. He said because the shares were in “electronic form” he could not access them right away.

“I decided to continue selling those shares, but since I did not have physical possession of them in order to make delivery in the required time period, I technically sold them short,” he said, adding that later, when he obtained the share certificates, he delivered them to the broker to close out the transaction.