Why do we repeatedly have to put up with comments that fly in the face of anything that makes sense.
Just to repeat the facts:
1 Some 70 SGH lawyers spent over 3 months, in advance of the purchase of QPP's PSD and associated businesses in early/mid 2015, working live through a portfolio of over 8,000 cases selected by SGH which SGH bought title to for £12m (some A$25m at the time), in order to see what the cases involved and how those timed to do so settled.The cases chosen were said to represent a full cross section of all the different types of cases taken on by QPP. The £12m also bought SGH a 3 month period of exclusivity before signing heads of agreement relating to the acquisition.
2. In addition to the above, a team of SGH's own financial people, including independent external advisers (almost certainly from its auditors - I can't now recall - who will have carried out all the normal due diligence work that would be expected in a transaction of this size and nature) worked on the accounting and other records throughout the same period.
3 Separately and independently, in December 2014, QPP had engaged an independent firm of accountants - the little known and even less respected PwC - to carry out whatever work they deemed necessary to enable them to report to the newly appointed board at QPP, following the dismissal of QPP's founder, Robert Terry, in September 2014 - some 8 months before the sale of the PSD was completed - on the veracity of the company's accounting and other records, for a minimum period of two years before 31 December 2014 and up to the point their work stopped in the the current year (to 31 December 2015).
4 The results of PwC's work were made fully available to SGH and the transaction completed on 31 May 2015, SGH's official spokesperson saying immediately after competion that although PwC's findings would result in restatement of QPP's financial statements to date, SGH was satisfied that QPP's PSD's financial statements, prepared using accounting policies adopted in preparing SGH's own financial statements, showed that the acquisition would be earnings accretive, with the acquisition price of £649m being reflective of 7.1 times underlying earnings.
Logic alone tells us that so many people so amply qualified, looking specifically for areas of uncertainty or misstatement, cannot possible all have missed something as material as is now said by so many armchair experts say was missed. All the evidence points to the problems associated with QPP's PSD (now called SGS) arising after acquisition, not before.
Now along comes prosperman to misquote one of poetry's finest works by Walter Scott in telling us definitively, in his expert way, what really happened.
Thanks, prosperman - most helpful.
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