Re: Should It Not Be Buyer Beware?
Just a thought ...
Just a thought?
No.
Basic common sense which, from the looks of how things are going, is not at all that basic or common.
At this point in time the one thing I am convinced of is that Lynch is the chosen fall guy in this charade while absolutely everyone else involved (HP's board, the auditors, etc.) gets to go home without any pending issues.
eg:
I. It has been reported that a total of 15 firms advised HP on the Autonomy deal, among them heavyweights UBS, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, with Slaughter & May and Morgan Lewis serving as the company's legal advisers.
15 top level firms and no one saw any red lights?
Are all these firms staffed by dumb DHs?
II. The auditors involved assured HP that it could go ahead and pay 8.8 billion for Autonomy but shortly after the purchase, HP decided to write down over 75% of the price paid.
Then they were able to expressly deny any "wrongdoing or liability" in exchange for settling with HP for 45M, probably the amount of their evidently unearned and obviously unjustified consulting fees.
No liability?
A joke, albeit very expensive for HP.
And they are still laughing.
As an example from long ago: IBM paid Lotus $3.25bn for the Notes email client which, as everyone knows, went nowhere but to oblivion, very fast.
Now ...
Did IBM's Gerstner write off $2.6bn from that acquisition and then sue Lotus' Manzi for it?
III. HP flushed 8.8 billion down the toilet but somehow (magically?) managed to settle the matter with HP's shareholders for a measly 100M, which in the end came out of the shareholder's own pockets.
Basically, 100M more to be added add to the 8.8 billion write down.
Incredible but true.
IV. 8.8 billion dollars is certainly not a number any corporation can ignore, more so if it is a write off on the puchase of a company they paid 11.7 billion for.
You could write off (maybe) up to 10% on a deal because of ... whatever.
It happens all the time, there are many factors that come into play post facto that can justify a write off for such a percentage.
But what we are talking about here is over 75% of the price HP paid for Autonomy.
I don't know about M. Lynch, but I'm convinced that all the HPE executives involved in this monumentally absurd fuck-up are either crooks or dumber than a (used) Brillo pad.
My money is 10-1 on their being crooks.
And who knows what else has been brushed under the carpet.
But a question remains:
Just why did HP push and shove so much in order to get this deal through?
And then, just where has all the moolah gone?
I think there's much more to this than what has been revealed.
Just a thought.
O.