Last week, I wrote up the unusual episode with the CEO of Ultrasonic (a tennis shoe company on the SDAX here in Germany). The CEO had disappeared, cash was missing, and the fear by the company was that he'd stolen the funds. The value of the stock went way south (roughly 75-percent down).
Well....a week passed. Yesterday....there's a new report. The CEO has identified himself, and noted that he was merely on holiday in China....going to the Philippines for medical treatment, and had lost his cellphone. So naturally, if you tried to call him.....you couldn't get him.
Coming immediately out of Asia to quickly fix this? Well....he simply said that he intends to do this....just not at the present time. Maybe he's in serious pain or in some discomfort from the medical treatment.
The bank reaction over the loan they'd arranged? It's in the way of sixty-million-dollars involved in the new expansion for the company. The impression I get is that Cathay United Bank....wants their money ASAP, with interest (somewhere in the range of $180k). They've lost confidence in the whole company, I doubt it'll be regained with this bank.
No one from the tennis shoe company has said much else.
My guess as to what happened? I think the CEO ran pretty much everything, and the minute that they got the bank loan....he transferred it to a "safe" place where only he could utilize it. Maybe it was drawing interest while the company was in various stages of planning (the intention of the loan anyway).
This missing story? Well.....if you start calling or sending emails and no one responds for four days.....these days, folks start thinking the worst. That's the kind of society we live in now. They expect immediate contact. The sad thing here.....this type of mentality in this case....may have destroyed the company's reputation.
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