I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…
I'm wondering why the CEO called in KPMG for an independent audit. Was he expecting a different result? Or he just picked them to break the news?
>I can just hope the Germans learn lessons from this. N'ah! When it comes to big banks, big industry, big infra projects, German state institutions are super corrupt, it makes Wall Street and the City of London look like saints.
I'm not sure the City of London can be made to look like saints of financial regulation, given their previous problems with PPI mis-selling, and the disintegration of a number of supposedly "safe, well capitalized" banks in the 2007/8 crash. Whilst you'd hope that lessons were learned, I'm not sure they were.
Trade on shares in the company was suspended What does this mean? Is a certain stock exchange not executing trades anymore? Are all exchanges worldwide in sync not executing trades? If so, how is the sync achieved? If it only was suspended at the Frankfurt stock exchange which is mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to see how it is doing at other exchanges. Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt pri…
> What does this mean? That you can not trade the stock for now. Trading has been resumed. On many stock exchanges there are rules for this. Something very common. > And what is the reason behind that? Is it guaranteed that shares of a company that files for insolvency are worth 0? No. The company could recover, could get bought etc. As a stock holder you are the last in line. Should the company get liquidated, bond…
>They are bankrupt, people are buying the stock and Hertz was even allowed to issue more shares.
Eh, sort of. The bankruptcy judge said they could, but the SEC said they had some "questions" about the offering's prospectus and Hertz basically withdrew the offer after that. It's not clear whether the company actually sold any shares.
When the scam is big enough, there are consequences for the auditors. Enron sank Arthur Andersen, for example. Didn’t hurt the consulting arm (now Accenture) though.
I initially understood this to mean Accenture changed its name as a consequence of the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal. But Anderson Consulting changed its name to Accenture in January 2001, and the scandal only became public later that year. Seems like the two companies weren't very close even before that, the name change was required as part of a legal settlement with Arthur Anderson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac…
That split was always pretty interesting to me. It seemed Andersen Consulting bristled at being attached to Arthur Andersen, mostly because Andersen Consulting had to pay 15% of their profits to Arthur Andersen. I figured that the limited partnership nature of consulting/accounting businesses meant that even individual divisions maybe felt their business was their business.
The breakup started in 1997, but yeah it was ironic that they had agreed to jettison the name right before Arthur collapsed.
I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…
I have a relative in finance and he says this sort of issue is a lot more prevalent, it's just easier to hide when things are good. When times are bad it's more difficult so more get found out. But it's important to remember that people have been sounding the alarm about Wirecard for years and Worecard, the German government and German Finance Authority (BaFin) have gone after the short sellers and journalists who have tried to expose it. Very few involved have any incentive for these to be uncovered, those that do generally have a lot less power than those that don't want it found out and they will happily use that power to intimidate and destroy their opponents.
I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…
The EY point is interesting. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I worked there, a lot of care was put on audit clients as the partner(s) signing off the work had effectively unlimited liability, and could lose pretty much all their money in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately audit work, where the company decides on their auditor, has an in-built conflict of interests. If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous…
There actually seems to be very little accountability for the audit firms when this happens.
I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…
I'm wondering why the CEO called in KPMG for an independent audit. Was he expecting a different result? Or he just picked them to break the news?
Buys him time, the audit was necessary otherwise bonds/loans became due or a finance line would be withdrawn. By switching to KPMG he bought himself some time, probably to hide some of the assets they would likely try to seize, so that once he has done his 18 months he can go back to his multiple homes and yachts and live comfortably.
The EY point is interesting. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I worked there, a lot of care was put on audit clients as the partner(s) signing off the work had effectively unlimited liability, and could lose pretty much all their money in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately audit work, where the company decides on their auditor, has an in-built conflict of interests. If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous…
> If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous, then they risk losing the audit How is this a thing ?
Because it is an absolute race to the bottom (on price) when it comes to Big 4 audit. There is really no distinction or difference in services provided between the firms. You can practically switch from EY to one of the other three (if they don't mind excluding themselves from consulting work) overnight.
Disclaimer: work for Big 4 but in tech consulting, not audit.