As the FT reports this morning:
Rio Tinto and two former senior executives were hit with US fraud charges, and the miner with a UK penalty, on Tuesday for allegedly trying to hide a multibillion-dollar business failure by inflating the value of coal assets in Mozambique.
In a civil complaint filed in federal court in New York, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that Rio, Tom Albanese, its former chief executive, and Guy Elliott, a former chief financial officer, had ignored proper accounting standards and misled investors in their valuation of coal deposits that the company had purchased for $3.7bn and later sold for just $50m.
As they also note:
In the UK, the company was fined £27.4m over the affair, the largest fine the Financial Conduct Authority has levied on a company for a listing-rules breach.
So, let' ask the obvious question: where were the auditors?
The allegations largely relate to 2012. The auditors then were PWC, as they are now.
The sums now subject to investigation must be material. So where is the investigation into the audit? I can find no evidence that there is one.
Why not?
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Professor Michael Hudson has remarked “Dictators don’t dictate” in other words they are told by others what to do. Similarly we may add auditors don’t audit.
I’m sick of this white-collar crime crap – there is only place for such people and that is and should always be a custodial sentence in my view plus a seizing of assets generated by being fraudulent.
Perhaps it is tucked away under Donations To Charities.
So the question, where are the auditors when it comes to the state.
You’re a qualified accountant, why don’t you do an audit of the WGA?
The state claims IFRS compliance. Yet if you look at IAS 37 its clear that the WGA adherence is a complete sham.
Now I suspect you would want to go along with that. You’d have to reveal the true extent of the disaster of state debts.
I am t a loss as to what the WGA is
WGA – Whole of government accounts.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160111050204/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf
In summary, the estimates in the new supplementary table indicate a total Government pension
obligation, at the end of December 2010, of £5.01 trillion, or 342 per cent of GDP, of which around
£4.7 trillion relates to unfunded obligations.
Remember the Tories have doubled the debts. 10 trillion owed just for pensions. That’s what happens when you inherit a debt that quadrupled in 5 years. 2005-2010.
Why would you omit the pension debts from the national debt numbers other than to deceive?
Why would you include it if the income to pay for it is excluded
And you woukd be wise to read this http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/03/13/the-conservatives-have-been-the-biggest-borrowers-over-the-last-70-years/
But don’t bother to comment again
Someone calling themselves Lord Blagger is a troll
By “You” in the previous state, it was a general statement not a personal one.
I cannot fault your logic.
And I wonder who is going to make excuses for these auditors. I do not doubt that someone will.
Whoever they turn out to be, they – and PWC’s audit team at RTZ – are a bigger threat to the existing order than all the Bolsheviks and radicals that ever lived, argued, postured and pranced and preened, and proved themselves to be entirely ineffective.
Capitalism is built on answers to the question “What’s it worth?” and its foundations have rotted away if the answer is “Whatever it profits me to tell you while your money disappears”.
The question then becomes: “What are our governments doing about that?” and the best that I can say about it is that their inactivity and apparent inability to regulate reveals a great deal about who they work for, and who they definitely don’t.
Agreed