Patisserie Share Discussion Threads

[lefrene] 16/3/2019 11:23

Grant Thornton are the ones who should be keel-hauled. If they ran a motor garage I suspect they would issue an MOT just by looking at the car from across the road! People have a right to rely upon the auditors, it would be good to see a shareholder successfully sue them.

[phowdo] 16/3/2019 10:12

It probably started as a legitimate business with a bit of truth stretching to get the IPO away. Then the hole got bigger and bigger rather than being filled in...

LJ has ensured he has the requisite "plausible deniability".
Any incriminating evidence will have been shredded many months ago.
He still comes out about £40M ahead after the amount he and related parties banked at the IPO and subsequent sales.

Chris Marsh will be the fall guy, do a 12 month stretch in an open prison and then released to enjoy the millions he banked in options and at the IPO.

The auditors and administrators will continue to pick over the carcass at a grand an hour until nothing is left.

And AIM cements its reputation as being a top 3 destination to defraud investors.

[konradpuss] 16/3/2019 08:23

Augustus, I have said it before, he was not involved in the fraud. I might be wrong mind.

He had enough money for ever before PV so he only had his reputation to lose if he committed fraud to gain more money.

You might be right, however will we ever know? Maybe he found out about it (the fraud) and turned a blind eye.

I would find it funny if he was involved and 'did bird'.

[dudishes] 16/3/2019 01:31

You need to dig, Belgo a good start. He is done! All will be revealed by his mate, aye, the one arrested.

Luke, me old mate, you are done and dusted, Gotcha!

PS:- Some ignorant prat at that. Bye!

[konradpuss] 15/3/2019 21:24

Actually it has just clicked.

I knew L.J. way back prior to his Pizza Express days.

He had a very short attention span. He would be very focused for a short time and then on to the next (dare I say women or business!).

There you have it. He took his eye off the ball and actually probably never completely got into the detail of the business.

[konradpuss] 15/3/2019 21:06

Hope not!

Luke should take up a strong sense of religion.

He needs to come out and tell all he was a fool.

Chances are zero - his ego would not let him.

[safman] 15/3/2019 20:51

I find it unbelievable that this is the case..

Cash position overstated by £54million for a cake shop...??! and overall deficit of £94 million...

Absolutely everything comes out significantly more negative than envisaged ..

Did Luke get his £10 million paid back..?

saffy...

[lefrene] 15/3/2019 20:20

That's not far short of half a million quid per cake shop! I find it inconceivable that LJ knew nothing of this, especially so when other enterprises owned by him were supplying these outlets. Is he still in the country?

[sikhthetech] 15/3/2019 19:58

Patisserie Valerie accounts black hole now £94m, says KPMG

Cash overstated by £54m!!!


"Previous estimates had put the figure at £40m, but a breakdown of the new sum suggests Patisserie Valerie’s cash position had been overstated by £54m. The company’s debts had also been understated and the amount it was owed overstated, to a combined value of £17m. There was also a £23m discrepancy in the way it had valued its assets."

[topvest] 15/3/2019 19:56

Unbelievable. Yes, it appears that the accounts were a total work of fiction, probably from the start. Poor old Grant Thornton. No doubt they will carry a lot of the blame, but its really those that perpetrated the fraud that need to be caught, tried and put in prison. I'd like to bet that they don't serve time though. Until financial fraud is dealt with by putting people in prison, then justice is not being done.

[konradpuss] 15/3/2019 19:22

Wow! a £94 million deficit. On that basis did PV ever make a profit in the public arena?

I will have to go and add that up.

Yes, my dear old mate LJ is very quiet.

Where will he appear first? Answers on a postcard.

[pvb] 15/3/2019 18:52

Its absence is the more acute, now that its author, expert on subjects such as red tape, Brexit and other people’s incompetence, has also fallen silent on Twitter; and his popular personal website seems, at the time of writing, to have vanished. With luck, it won’t be too long before he is sharing details of his mercy dash on Evan Davis’s The Bottom Line: “Providing insight into business from the people at the top.”

Like it! ;-)

[opodio] 05/3/2019 06:58

What price the wisdom of Luke Johnson, when his own company tanks?
Catherine Bennett


Luke Johnson at a branch of Patisserie Valerie, London.
‘Unfortunately,” Luke Johnson wrote recently, “financial illiteracy permeates society from top to bottom. Too many ordinary people do not understand mortgages, pensions, insurance, loans or investing.”

Johnson, the entrepreneur whose biggest asset, Patisserie Valerie, now needs bailing out, was being generous. Even after the 2008 financial crisis confirmed that corporate incompetence warranted unwavering public scrutiny, too many ordinary people remain equally ignorant about the operations and capabilities of business leaders, even those, like Mr Johnson, whose influence extends far beyond his imperilled patisserie company.

Some of us, inexcusably, even struggle with the basic jargon of “black hole”. As in: “The owner of Patisserie Valerie has been plunged into financial crisis after it revealed a multimillion pound accounting black hole.” Is it the same sort of black hole that astonished managers at Carillion, following a “deterioration in cashflows”? Or an industry synonym for the “material shortfall” disclosed by the Patisserie Valerie board, “between the reported financial status and the current financial status of the business”.

Either way, does the black hole’s existence mean that Mr Johnson must also be financially illiterate? Or is that question better addressed to Patisserie Valerie’s finance chief, Chris Marsh, with whom Johnson has worked since 2006? Marsh was arrested by the police, then released on bail.

Regrettably, at the very moment when an ordinary person struggles to comprehend how £28m in May became minus £10m by October, and why one creditor, the HMRC, should be pursuing an unpaid tax bill of £1.4m – and what that tells us about the company’s leadership – it appears that Mr Johnson is taking a break from his weekly newspaper column. Its absence is the more acute, now that its author, expert on subjects such as red tape, Brexit and other people’s incompetence, has also fallen silent on Twitter; and his popular personal website seems, at the time of writing, to have vanished. With luck, it won’t be too long before he is sharing details of his mercy dash on Evan Davis’s The Bottom Line: “Providing insight into business from the people at the top.”


Patisserie Valerie crisis rocks Luke Johnson's business career
Read more
Happily, as others have noted, some of Mr Johnson’s earlier columns have addressed related issues such as, recently, “a business beginner’s guide to tried and tested swindles”. Watch out, he warns, for non-payment of creditors, dodgy advisers and attempts to overcomplicate things, so as to baffle the many people – unlike himself – who “do not understand the technicalities of investing or accounting”.



what a con job

[microscope] 21/2/2019 13:27

Anyone remind me which institutions had stakes, and how many they held, here? Someone did post it a while back but struggling to find the info as at suspension

[zztop] 18/2/2019 08:34

I thought the shareholders are history?

[buywell3] 18/2/2019 04:06

once again augustusgloop gets it right


augustusgloop11 Jan '19 - 11:13 - 2473 of 3061
0 1 1
That article just doesn't look right.

If they have the money now - how can it take 6 months to get the payments up to date?

They can't have that many large suppliers - so staff time should not be an issue.
An old invoice sitting on a desk - is either going to be paid or not paid - they are not going to be spending many hours now investigating if it was a false demand.

They must know that the old invoices are valid - if they have the money to pay - it would take minutes.

6 months from now is 9 months from identifying the problem.

Does this mean that the reality is that they don't have enough money (after the funds were raised) to pay the outstanding invoices.
Wouldn't that mean that they are insolvent - and should be wound up?

3 months on and shareholders are no better informed about the state of the Company than they were at the start.

[safman] 17/2/2019 23:02

I read an article about Causeway Capital having close ties to KPMG...



So, the administrators at KPMG have decided to shun Mike Ashley’s bid for Patisserie Valerie and hand it to Causeway Capital, the private equity firm which has close links to… KPMG.

That would be the same KPMG which audits Bread Holdings, also owned by Pat Val’s former owner Luke Johnson. Say what you will about the quality of its sickly sweet cakes, you can’t deny Pat Val’s unerring ability to leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

The works of administrators are opaque at the best of times, called as they are to make a decent fee for themselves as well as maximising the salvage for investors, who in this case include Luke Johnson — not especially popular among the rest of PatVal’s creditors


I'm afraid its all a bit colorful for me..

saffy..

[meijiman] 17/2/2019 18:39

Well if those are the culprits LJ comes across as a complete mug.

[sikhthetech] 17/2/2019 16:44

up to 6 facing arrest.... How deep was the fraud and the sheer number of people involved is truly amazing...

[tradejunkie2] 17/2/2019 15:13

Good to hear about the potential arrests hopefully they choke on their Patisserie
cakes when the police knock on their doors.

Avoid AIM shares.