Good news – former CFO of public company jailed for fiddling the accounts. Oh to see that happen more often so as to deter manipulation of accounts that is so prevalent and so damaging to investors.
Sushovan Hussain, the former CFO of software company Autonomy, was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment by a US Court yesterday plus he was fined $4 million and ordered to forfeit $6.1 million he made from the sale of the company to Hewlett-Packard. He won’t even be spending time in a cushy minimum-security prison as he is a foreign national. He was found guilty some months ago on 16 counts of security fraud and other counts. In essence the allegation was that sales were inflated in the accounts and the result was that when HP bought the company, they had to write off much of the $11 billion they paid for it.
Although Autonomy was a UK public company, and the Serious Fraud Office did look at the case they decided to do nothing. However a civil action against Mr Hussain and the former Autonomy CEO, Mike Lynch is still being pursued in the English courts, and the latter also faces criminal charges in the USA.
Mr Hussain is planning to appeal the verdict. Let us hope he does not succeed because such cases provide a good deterrent to future malefactors.
These were some of the allegations against Autonomy:
- Booking transactions to resellers as revenue when there was no end-user license (i.e. “channel stuffing” as it is sometimes called).
- Engaging in “round-trip” transactions where purchases were invented so it could pay money to companies which then returned it to Autonomy to cover fictitious sales.
- Backdating sales transactions so they fell into a previous accounting period.
There was also a claim that bundles of hardware/software sales were treated as solely software in the accounts. Why does this matter? Because software sales are valued in company valuations much more highly than hardware sales.
The above are some of the things that investors in IT companies need to look at although abuse can be difficult to spot in the published accounts of a public company. High accounts receivable and apparent lengthy payment delays can be clues. There were some questions raised about Autonomy’s accounts even before the takeover.
Hussain and Lynch have claimed that some of the disputed differences were simply down to different accounting standards (US GAAP versus IFRS) and I said when originally commenting on the case that I was unsure that this stood up to scrutiny. The US Court judge clearly rejected that argument.
But the sad thing is of course that we rarely see such cases pursued to criminal convictions in the UK, whether they are large or small companies.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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