An alternative view.4 Apr 2018 19:11
From Tom Winnfrith:
Yesterday at 7 AM Air Partner (AIR) fessed up to a �3.3 million black hole in its accounts via RNS but it was vague as to its nature and suggested that nothing big was going on. At 10.15 AM all eighty staff in the Gatwick Office were called into a meeting with CEO Mark Briffa and FD Neil Morris for a briefing. They were told far, far more. One of those present has come forward and states:
I am an employee of AP and was there along with about 80 others. We all thought that this was going to be an announcement about the good results and thus bonus.
So, at the meeting, Mark and Neil Morris were at the front of the room talking to us. Mark looked as ever confident while Neil was talking.
Mark explained that this bad debt goes back to 2003 and had only just been discovered by the auditors*. A very good client of ours had a series of flights and we never got paid because our paperwork wasn't in order. I won't name them because it was our fault and we still take a lot of work from them. Anyway, a former member of staff from the finance department took it upon them self to hide this debt by moving it around departments over many years. Why? Who knows. It wasn't their mistake to cover up but that of a trading team.
So Briffa explained that over the weekend his PA had managed to persuade the former employee to come in and explain what they had been doing all these years. It's worth explaining that over the past year there has been a big re-org of the finance team and a lot of staff were severed. This person was one of them and now that they had gone there was nobody to continue their activity. Mark said that their words when asked to come in were 'we were wondering when you'd find out'. They apparently said that they were responsible for hiding this accounting hole on their own but that a number of the finance staff knew.
This calls into question the culture that Briffa and Morris had built, where a team of people thought that it was better to hide a mistake they hadn't made than to deal with it by bringing it to the attention of the CFO.
Mark insisted that no cash had left the business and that there was no intent to defraud but that they were in discussions with lawyers about whether the former employee had broken the law. He also said that he expected that the the company would be investigated by the authorities, the FRC. He further said that forensic accountants would be coming in and that over the weekend he had wondered if this person could have brought the company to its knees had they not left.
*Now clarified by source, the programme was started in 2003 the bad debt is from 2011 and the black hole was discovered internally, the auditors missec it every time.
If this �3.3 million black hole affects stated PTP should not certain bonuses be repaid?
Was it 1 person or more than one person involved in the act or the multi year cover-up? If so how many of the miscreants still work at Air
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