LONDON (Alliance News) - Viceroy Research, which took on troubled South African retailer Steinhoff International Holdings NV, believes FTSE 250 packaging company RPC Group PLC has been hiding its poor underlying health via a series of acquisitions, The Sunday Times newspaper reported.
According to the newspaper, the research firm - which is led by former former social worker Fraser Perring - believes the RPC's underlying earnings would have fallen in four out of six years since 2011 without the acquisitions and that the company would have stopped growing without deals. The company made 10 acquisitions between December 2014 and 2015.
Viceroy Research also claims that RPC has used aggressive accounting when making the deals, including allocating large sums as goodwill, the newspaper reported.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/steinhoff-short-seller-fraser-perring-lays-siege-to-plastics-firm-rpc-d35dfx6tz