I seem to recall that one of their competitors got into very hot water about 20 years ago for almost the same reason, but I can't remember more details. \s
Yeah, that is a good example of a company making a badly timed business decision and ultimately recovering completely unscathed (although it seemed like they were in hot water at the time).
It really does seem like a historic moment in business history. I'm strugling to think of a precedent, other than cases of outright fraud, where a prominent firm (= its management) experienced so much negative publicity and self-owning.
Non-technically, it was a horrow-show. I worked at the company from 2005/06 to 2012, when I quit after witnessing shameful behaviour towards women, a party-culture that literally lead to rape allegations, and a CEO who looted the company for money and shipped it to tax-havens.
One of the area managers - Kaveh, IIRC - also had a double morale on line with Trump. He was very "don't put your pen in the company ink", and proceeded to get one of his subordinates pregnant.
I remember there was an "anti Meltwater blog" at some point, but I can't find it now. I don't remember the URL either, so I can't look it up on archive.org. However, this site[0] seems to contain copy-pasted stuff from it.
As said, my experiences are 10+ years old, and hopefully things have improved.
Fascinating. A lot of the stuff they did still makes sense. Even having a hyperenergetic lunatic as a company face might work. But how on Earth did the investors refuse to address the red flags, that's criminal.
More than a quarter of their profits were being used to pay interest on loans taken out after years of decline.
The management seem to do a good job of diverting attention from the debts but the company was seriously badly managed, it was only a matter of time before it went bump.
That's not to mention the 2006 Carbon Monoxide poisoning incident which meant people like me resolved never to use the company again.
Throwing in a guess for the second company, was it Zest Finance?
I know this isn't the point of the thread, but I couldn't help myself. I will ask for forgiveness (as I am sure we have all done in both technical and ethical matters)
Unknown. The company now claims they got defrauded themselves, but like the OP says, that's weak sauce. It looks like the company was completely fradulent forever. Interesting and more clear cut is the role of the German financial authorities, as they protected that companies for all those years they either are either completely incompetent or completely corrupt.
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