Junior employee blamed for Centro's bungled audit [The Age]
The PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who presided over Centro's flawed audit in 2007 has told a court he still does not believe he did anything wrong, and instead blames the debacle on a junior PwC staff member he supervised. Stephen Cougle also denied accusations by Centro's lawyers yesterday that he was lying to the Federal Court or being deliberately dishonest about what happened at a Centro board committee meeting in September 2007. Under cross-examination in a class action, Mr Cougle said he was disappointed that tasks recorded to be done in worksheets compiled by the PwC audit team were not done. Those tasks included checking the size and maturity dates of Centro's debt facilities to ensure the property group's loans were properly classed as short-term or long-term. Mr Cougle agreed with Centro's counsel that he did not believe he had done anything wrong as lead auditor and that in his view all the errors were done by PwC staff whom he supervised. Asked who he blamed the most, Mr Cougle named Brad Duggan. ''Brad was supervising the staff in that area; they didn't do it,'' Mr Cougle said. ''He reviewed the section. That's where it should have been picked up definitively. It wasn't done. It's very disappointing to me,'' Mr Cougle said.
At a shareholder meeting Friday, a majority of Olympus stockholders are likely to back a slate of management-proposed directors—despite opposition from proxy advisers and some prominent foreign investors. Japanese institutional investors constituting roughly 15% of Olympus's voting shares said they are planning to vote with management. Lenders and corporations that do business with Olympus also are expected to stick closely with management recommendations. Together, those votes are likely to total at least the 50% needed to approve the slate, based on discussions with several investors.
You can expect more interviews like this one.
It's known as Florida's greenbelt law. The statute is meant to preserve farmland by taxing it at special, low rate. But some of the act's biggest beneficiaries are deep-pocketed developers, who often take advantage of it by literally renting cows. […] To qualify for the exemption, property owners are required to use their land for "bona fide" agricultural purposes. But what does "bona fide" mean? That's far from clear. Aided by lax court rulings, developers have seized on that ambiguity by leasing out their land to cattle ranchers while they prepare to build, often shaving hundreds of thousands of dollars off their tax bills.
Someone who's doing it wrong.