Apr
9
BDO: ‘Pescanova was a fraud arranged from the top’
Filed Under EN
BDO’s accountant partner Santiago Sane defended himself at court claiming that Pescanova was an “institutional fraud, perfectly arranged from the top” and “undetectable” from the external auditor, La Voz de Galicia reports.
Pescanova’s former external auditor BDO was called to testify at court yesterday, after having been charged with alleged falsification of economic and financial information.
During his testimony Sane blamed the former Pescanova’s chairman Manuel Fernandez de Sousa for the bankruptcy of the Spanish seafood multinational.
He also blamed the senior management of the company’s financial, accounting, treasury and internal audit divisions.
Sane said banks did not submit all the documentation required to know the details and irregularities about the loans and factoring agreements with the beleaguered multinational.
In 2013, Pescanova reported fake transactions over a period of six years, in a bid to raise liquidity.
This was done through a network of holding companies, whose only purpose was to obtain liquidity through “discounting of bills/and factoring” with various financial institutions, to improve Pescanova’s operating results (turnover and margin), according to the KPMG’s forensic audit report.
BDO was in charge of auditing Pescanova’s accounts up in the years preceding the Spanish company’s spectacular bankruptcy.
The accounts have since been discredited and drastically revised by Pescanova’s bankruptcy administrator Deloitte, and both Pescanova and US shareholder Cartesian have threatened to sue BDO as the list of financial scandals unraveled in the wake of its bankruptcy.
In October last year, BDO resigned as external auditor for Pescanova and Ernst Young won a tender to audit the company’s 2014-2016 financial accounts.
Click here to read the original story (in Spanish).
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