[ad_1]
Yep, Corporate Travel Management is now most definitely burnt toast, its Wednesday morning response to predator VGI Partners’ Sunday short attack being spectacularly free of a single direct rebuttal to the hedge fund’s damning line-by-line allegations of operational and financial chicanery. It was a Brisbane special, the denial padded with non-answers and empty of redemptive data. Accused of manipulating its revenue recognition, it blew smoke, not bookkeeping. The market spoke, with shares down 27.5 per cent, or $823 million in market cap terms, by the session’s close. CEO Jamie Pherous is personally down $155 million, while major holder Hyperion Asset Management has lost $44 million on paper. Ouch.
As we suspected, chairman Tony Bellas didn’t retire at the company’s AGM. To his credit, he will remain at the helm of HMAS Miserably F—ed while the iceberg dry-humps the engine room. Poor bastard – after a decade there, his retirement was but days too late.
Actually, don’t pity him just yet. In his address, Bellas did what all corporate spinners and speechwriters dread: he went rogue. Incensed by VGI’s accusation that the company fakes a larger network than it truly has, he first conceded that “I suppose it is our fault because they went to the address that was on our website.” As opposed to?
Bellas then disputed that “we didn’t have a Glasgow office,” claiming “we moved addresses in May… but we updated our website back in April. The photo in the VGI report purports to be from our website with our old address. I don’t know when they took that but [it] can’t have been since, um, April this year. We have 73 people in the Glasgow office.”
Problem is, that old address was current on Corporate Travel’s website fewer than 24 hours before Bellas said this. That is a dead set fact. Whether dishonest or incompetent, Bellas belongs. But so did his audience, most of them were Morgans’ private client advisers fossicking for hope somewhere buried between the facts.
Advertisement
Hilariously, Morgans badyst Belinda Moore (herself a shareholder) told clients on Wednesday Corporate Travel “stated that its website may not have always been updated with current addresses for some of its offices that recently relocated and new premises that have recently opened”. Right, so standing accused of faking your office network, your chairman railing at the AGM about the integrity of that network, you do what? Put those “recently relocated and new premises” on your website? Nope. Not a single new or relocated premises has been added. In the USA, it deleted two offices, and scrubbed one in Paris. The other one in Glasgow is now a single child, and if they didn’t have 73 people there yesterday, they certainly will have when the lights go on this morning. The short-term unemployment in Scotland’s western Lowlands just went through the floor.
[ad_2]
Source link
