re: Let's Make a Deal Exclusive of Fraud, which is your implication here, all the money should exist and completely unimpacted by writeoffs (which are in essense cash neutral balance sheet and sometimes income statement transactions).
re: Let's Make a DealFraud would mean there is something to prosecute. I have no basis to make that statement, and never have.
BUT:
Just because a companies books meet GAAP standards, and passes audit under Sarbanes Oxley, does not mean there is not a hell of a lot of room for "wiggle".
Ask yourself how much material was grown during the bubble, how many sales were booked, both of which are now junk? How many realestate leases were entered into and are now transparent buildings? If you were the landlord and knew they had the cash, would you let them slide out?
Read the book: Perfectly Legal.
What is net likely to happen is sale of the optics unit to Huawei allows the execs to put wads of the cash into their pockets. Less those stored up writeoffs. Still: Nice umbrella.
Happened before when JDS bought SDL. Execs put all the cash in their pockets.
re: Let's Make a DealHi seven, Technically the current Marconi management were part of the team that "got the company into trouble". In a 3-part interview in the Financial Times, John Mayo (the former Finance Director who was the first to have to fall on his sword) basically accused the new leadership, under Mike Parton, of that very thing. Unfortunately I can't find a link for you, but it was quite the "kiss and tell" scandal for the articles to be published at the time. If anyone does have a link or a copy of the articles, maybe you can post them.
I'm not endorsing Mr.Mayo's comments, but if you check the current executive leadership of Marconi
You'll see that, while there are a few new faces, the core leadership are all long-serving Marconi people.
Personally I have a lot of admiration for Mike Parton, the CEO. The complexity of the debt for equity swap was incredible, and he stuck to his guns to try and bring the company through it in a workable state (ie. avoiding as much asset-stripping as possible). Parton was absolutely the driving force behind that deal, and the deal saved the company, and hopefully safeguarded thousands of jobs. But the price was paid by the shareholders and (to a lesser extent) the debtholders, of course.
As you said, the sad choice for both Tellium and Marconi shareholders was to be wiped out completely, or to retain at least a fraction of their former investment.
Let's hope we're past those times now, and that companies will learn from those mistakes.
re: Let's Make a DealHi seven, Not sure LR and Marconi are good comparisons :-)
I agree with you that the employees of a company should be rewarded when the company does better.
I think a big question, and one that is hard to answer fairly is "how much more should the 'leadership' of a company be rewarded than the 'workers'?". How can we justify a bonus at the top end of the employee scale that would buy 50 average houses in the UK, and at the bottom end a bonus that might not pay the rent on one of those houses for one month?
LR is a still a small company and our leaders still have to do work :-) Also, I'm sure the founders took a significant financial risk when they started the company, and they deserve a reward for taking that risk. There is no equivalent risk to the leaders of large companies (unless they take the kind of ill-advised loans that happened with the Tellium crew). For example, Lord Simpson and John Mayo (former CEO and FD of Marconi) each left with more money in their "golden handshake" than an average Marconi employee would earn in their lifetime.
I don't begrudge Mike Parton and the Marconi executives their bonuses. But I think the magnitude of those bonuses is a bit embarrasing for them, particularly so soon after so many people have been laid off, and so many shareholders have seen so much of their equity disappear.
To clarify my position. I'm an ex-Marconi employee. But I did alright, and left on very good terms to join Light Reading. No complaints here. My strongest bias is to see the company continuing to improve so that friends and former colleagues can retain their jobs.
If you're not based in the UK then you might not be aware that there's a general feeling of unhappiness here about senior executives being paid bonuses for dubious performance. I will stress that I don't classify Mike Parton in that group - as I said I think he's worked a minor miracle to keep Marconi in business.
That feeling applies to the US as well (see Pat Russo).
I think we are on the same page on that. I agree it looked bad, but they did pull things out of close to (what in the US would be called) Chapter 7.
The original post was about how bad that was to the folks to reward them after having trashing the stock. My point was that Parton became leader after the stock had been trashed.
Anyway, I much less happy with Lucent executives who are happily destroying a firm and earning millions at a time. From where I stand, each of them should struggle with looking at a mirror. In particular Janet Davidson, the wireline business craters. They even responded to the FTTP business and lost with QB as a partner when a non-telco vendor (Motorola) got to the shortlist with the same partner. I would have resigned from the embarassment. I am simply stunned that people consider themselves worth millions in salary (let alone bonus) with such performance.
1) do you believe really exists,
2) how much will be left after the hidden writeoffs are written off?
Just getting calibrated
-Why