Loading up the truck, page-2748

A bit old from australian.
30/3/16.
It was not always so. Bambini Trust is the kind of Sydney institution where members of the city’s high-flying legal and corporate fraternity regularly lunch, and it was into this busy restaurant that Grech walked one day four months ago — and dismissed long-running market concerns about the financial health of one of this country’s greatest law firms.
“Our investors, I think, are very comfortable with the business model because its proven that it works. I think what they are concerned about is whether we have bitten off more than we can chew and whether we can deliver the synergy benefits of scale,” Grech said over lunch in November.
Now it appears many of those concerns were well justified. They raise questions not just about the appropriateness of the company’s financial arrangements but about the very nature of the juncture of law and commerce.
“What people are waiting for is to see whether we can prove that we’re not just an acquisition business, that we’re also a business that can grow organically and deliver earnings growth,” Grech said.
“We’ve done that before, we’ve done that through the period, but it’s masked quite a bit by the acquisition, and it’s understandable that people would be sceptical, so we have to prove that, and we will.”
Grech has taken exception to claims of account manipulation.
“This idea that they are trying to suggest, that we manipulate, is a very serious allegation to make,” he has said. “You do get lumpiness — there’s no hiding from that, it’s obvious — but that’s not because people are trying to manipulate it. That would involve us having been in a 15 year conspiracy with Pitcher Partners and now Ernst & Young. I mean, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a smart, devious guy, but I don’t fancy myself as much of a mastermind. In the end, people will make up their minds for themselves.”
The truth is, hedge funds and other institutional investors have in the past manipulated the market for their own gain. A quiet word to a journalist, the insinuation there might be a problem, is sometimes enough to crush a company’s share price.
In the case of Slater & Gordon, several major fund managers who had significant money invested in the firm complained to ASIC.
The regulator has taken action in the past. In 2009, it banned a trader at Linwar Securities for spreading false rumours about the health of Macquarie Group’s cash management division.
But if it is simply a case of market manipulation, shares usually rebound. Macquarie’s share price has more than doubled in the decade since those rumours.
It is not expected Slater & Gordon’s will stage a similar recovery.