Business and Economics

The American Economy is Destroying Itself [ 26 August 2005 ]
Accountants and managers are driving jobs offshore and with them the men who have the background to innovate. Innovation from offshore means the death of the goose that lays the golden egg and keeps accountants off the dole queue. Thus quoth a real economist.

 

Killing the dollar in Iran [ 26 August 2005 ]
George and his peculiar friends are leaning on Iran. If they stop trading oil in dollars it will save a lot of money worldwide and hurt America. Other commodities could be traded in Euros too. Saddam Hussein was going down this road then the Americans invaded. Cause and effect?

 

KPMG Auditors Did Not Notice Rolls-Royce Bribery [ 24 January 2017 ]
QUOTE
The accountancy giant that signed off Rolls-Royce accounts while it bribed its way around the world is now facing its own investigation. KPMG was the auditor for Rolls-Royce during almost all of the 24-year period in which employees secretly paid off middlemen and officials in 11 developing countries to win lucrative business.

Last week Rolls agreed to pay £671-million in total to UK, US and Brazilian authorities to settle the allegations of bribery, false accounting and corruption from 1989 to 2013 in countries including Russia, Iraq and China..........

Rolls-Royce is thought to have made around £250 million from the corrupt deals over which it has agreed to an £497.25-million settlement with the Serious Fraud Office (SO).
UNQUOTE
This shows that audits are pretty much a waste of time. Recall that Arthur Andersen auditors didn't notice that Enron [ the Crooked E ] was indulging in multigigabuck fraud. They disappeared just like Enron.

 

HBOS Banker Stole £245 Million [31 January 2017 ]
It was with a little help from his friends. They had lotsa fun spending it. You might wonder from the mugshots how they ever got off the dole queue.

 

Auditor Did Not Notice £250 Million Fraudulent Profit In Tesco Accounts [ 29 September 2017 ]
QUOTE
Three 'dishonest' former Tesco bosses 'cooked the books' so the supermarket could 'grossly exaggerate' profits to the stock market by £263million and save their mega-salary jobs, a court heard today. Carl Rogberg, 50, Chris Bush, 51, and John Scouler, 49, are alleged to have led the 'white collar crime' plot which eventually wiped £2billion off the total share value of Britain's biggest retailer.

The supermarket's former finance chief, managing director and food commercial head were investigated after Tesco was found to have boosted its profits, which sent 'shock waves' through the stock market, Southwark Crown Court heard. Prosecutor Sasha Wass QC said the case 'boiled down' to the men 'cooking the books'  in an attempt to save their multi-million-pound jobs and huge salaries amounting to £5.5million between them in 2014.

The men are charged with fraud by abuse of position and false accounting between February and September that year.
UNQUOTE
Company accounts are designed to conceal not reveal. It worked for Enron.

 

Hewlett-Packard Suing Mike Lynch Of Autonomy For Five Billion Dollars   [ 27 March 2019 ]
QUOTE
A British entrepreneur 'committed a deliberate fraud over a sustained period of time' to artificially inflate the value of his software company by billions of dollars ahead of its sale, the High Court has heard.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) - which bought Mike Lynch's Cambridge-based firm Autonomy for 11.1 billion US dollars (£8.4 billion) in 2011 - claims he and former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain 'artificially inflated Autonomy's reported revenues, revenue growth and gross margins'.

The American technology giant is suing Mr [ Doctor in fact ] Lynch and Hussain for around five billion US dollars (£3.8 billion) in what is believed to be the UK's biggest civil fraud trial.
UNQUOTE
This is odd. Hewlett-Packard is run by adults, not amateurs. They have been round the block a few times. Did they do due diligence? After paying over the odds for Autonomy  they sacked him quite quickly. Did the auditors do their job properly? Their sort are usually a waste of time and money. Doing them would make more sense. However look at the picture of Mike Lynch and wonder whether you would trust him to run a whelk stall. NB Sushovan Hussain, his head accountant sounds like a wrong 'un and got done for fraud in America.

 

 

Ludwig von Mises Institute
There are two kinds of economists, Austrian and rubbish. Ludwig was an Austrian economist. Worth a look sometimes.

 

Spice Trade
The spice trade was interesting, stimulating, challenging, exciting, dangerous, an excuse for murder, invasions, fraud and very profitable for the lucky, vigorous or unscrupulous.