Reuters reports that Robert Gillison, the treasurer at embattled US Foodservice, has conceded that when Ahold bought the company three years ago it knew accounting problems were going to be an issue.
"We had identified that we had inadequate controls and we needed to work on them," Gillison, told Reuters in an interview. "Generally speaking, the openness and visibility of this stuff in this company is going to be much higher."
Gillison said he had no idea why two former executives with the company had inflated profits by $880 million over two years, and noted that there is no evidence that the two men were pocketing the money themselves.
"We had identified that we had inadequate controls and we needed to work on them," Gillison, told Reuters in an interview. "Generally speaking, the openness and visibility of this stuff in this company is going to be much higher."
Gillison said he had no idea why two former executives with the company had inflated profits by $880 million over two years, and noted that there is no evidence that the two men were pocketing the money themselves.
- KC's View:
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Better late than never.
Unless, of course, you happen to be a stockholder. Or one of the two executives who got sacked. Or Cees van der Hoeven, who was forced to resign from his Royal Ahold CEO job.
We'd feel sorry for the executives if we didn't think that this was a sanctioned, pervasive policy, and that this lone gunman theory of financial fraud against the company was a lot of bull.
