HONEST & ACCURATE LIQUIDITY RISK DISCLOSURE IS PARAMOUNT IN LOMBARD DIRECTOR’S COURT CASE FOR SHAREHOLDERS RESOLUTION
Grace is about restoring integrity, accuracy, honesty, wellbeing, Kiwi kinship when trust is robbed, eroded and breached.
Recovery is about letting the aftermath’s ashes, atoms, dust settle. When confidence returns. having hope again to rise again with the just.
Lombard & Bridgecorp are two companies whose management could have been better concerning their investors, partners and shareholders. Lombard lost $10 million in investors monies between December 2007 and April 2008. The stories remind me of the AIG scandals at the brink of the GFC in America. There are similarities between AIG, Bridgecorp, Lombard and also South Canterbury Finance and Strategic Finance’s management methodologies that burned trusting shareholders who were left out of pocket through directorship oversights of error that equated to shareholders ‘snatch and grab’ fronts. In my view AIG for example was a case of ‘economic elderly abuse’ concerning this companies shareholders.
Abusing the elderly, is never okay. Many people lost their hard earned pension savings in an AIG kind of tale.
In such stories, often the directors of these companies with a high profile are the ones that journalists target to do investigative journalism stories on. The journalist makes a name for themselves in such cases appeasing the angry shareholders that they interview. New stars are made while some are tarnished. We are fascinated by these stories, because they are stories of “where anything can go wrong.”
The contexts of these stories is set against a backdrop of a world stage where entire countries (many centuries old and once pinnacles of empires of the world) have been financially mismanged. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain are a few countries whose storylines mirror the Bridgecorp, Lombard, Southern Investments, South Canterbury Finance and AIG stories. Therefore, the principles of Bridgecorp and Lombard (et al) stories that the courts decide on with judgements and outcomes are valid concerning much wider cases too in the Eurozone, because the wisdom of judges endeavors to restore a sense of order to the purpose of fairness in business practice – moving forward.
These same principles could also be applied to governance models in the Eurzone to help make them stronger too - a key reason why I find these cases so appealing. On one hand we learn from mistakes (even mistakes of a lust for delusions of unsustainable grandeur and fleeting addictions of greed that can seduce us all in moments of stupidity).
On the other hand mistakes are fertile ground to glean wisdom we may have lost along the way, a crucial reason why judges hold the office of judge and serve the many-sided prisms of justice’s diverse findings of truth, in their role – effectively – as public servants for the wider good of society.
The best judges turn mistakes into national lessons that better and redeem us all. “The greater good, in good faith” is then restored through a judge’s wise presentation of order that’s fair and just.
It is not a glamorous job being a judge. Wrestling with finding a medium of truth’s narrow and least walked path, is what judges must do when they “inherit a case that is all up the boohai” on their desk. The Lombard case is one such case. Once a judge is satisfied they have gathered all of the facts, the path good judges establish from the facts in seeking a wise judgement, then has the potential to become a highway, for others to journey on more safely. In this regard, they are traffic controllers too of increased trade into an economy.
The best judge restores once-eroded trust. They dissolve doubts. They are magicians. Society’s healers. Builders of strong foundations whose vision is so strong and advanced that it is often realized long after they’ve gone.
[Lombard Chairman, Sir Douglas Graham - Photo Getty Images]. (more…)
