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PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud
An anonymous reader writes Zalman's parent company Moneual's CEO Harold Park, and vice presidents Scott Park and Won Duck-yeok, have apparently spent the last five years producing fraudulent documentation relating to the sales performance of Zalman. These documents inflated sales figures and export data for Zalman's products. The reason? Bank loans. By increasing sales and exports Park and his associates were able to secure bank loans totaling $2.98 billion. Someone has finally realized what has been going on, though, triggering Zalman's shares to be suspended on the stock market and the company filing for bankruptcy protection. The questions now turn to how this practice was allowed to continue unnoticed for so long and how the banks will go about getting their near $3 billion back.
Will he be sent to the Cooler?
In these situations everyone should just chill and take it easy. Clearly we don't need to let things spin out of control. I'm sure Zalman's lawyers can take the heat.
The occurence of this sort of fraud in the 19th century led to the emergence of the role of auditors, whose responsibility is to ensure that the accounts are telling the truth; as a result this sort of fraud is rare in Western countries. The question now becomes one of who the auditors were - were they ones who should have done the job, or were the banks fooled into accepting a poor audit. In either case however the auditors will be on the hook unless they can prove that the CEO was doing a VERY good job of hiding the facts.
Presumably sold off to multiple interested parties by a curator if it gets to that stage.
All of their coolers - and we're not just talking fans here, but their vast library of heatsink and heatpipe designs (both functional and aesthetic targets), cooling pads, etc. will be an easy target for either a competitor, or for a company to keep Zalman going and focus only on those. It's what Zalman's known for - to the point of their own website suggesting for the VGA products that "Zalman cooler is equipped with VGA card", rather than the other way around ;) - so that would make some sense.
The peripherals.. well, most of them can probably die off. Not too many people seem to care about Zalman mice, keyboards, USB sticks, headsets, etc. - they're either a dime a dozen or too fancy for their own worth, and only a few get to be big brand names in that arena.
There's some niche products like their virtual device storage options that would make a good complementary offering in WD's lineup.
Given their financial numberfiddling, I can't help but imagine that some divisions were used to prop up others to help make things look good - so selling it all together seems, to me, unlikely; except for purposes of selling it on again
(yes, the IP vultures, whose day job is to make up ways in which popular products violate their IP in the hopes of landing settlements because that's cheaper than bothering with the court case even if you think they're on extremely shaky ground)
Except that, of course, in modern capitalism banks are too big to fail and take these risks because they know it's not their own money that's at stake, but that of tax payers.
But well obfuscated.
Partial answers are given in this article, where a whistleblower answers some of these questions. Some of the answers seem like they have suffered in translation, unfortunately.
By the way, the fraud was not committed by Zalman, but by the South Korean company, Moneual, that bought Zalman in 2011.
I am familiar with US / western bankruptcy law. This is Korea so your mileage will vary.
First, the issue is one of finance, not operations. If that is true, that means the company is still viable – that is worth more as a operating entity than being sold off for parts. So it will probably keep on going.
Second, from a brief scan of the article, there are no allegations of fraud against Zalman. It is against Moneual, which owns 90% of Zalman's shares. It sounds like it is not the court seizing Zalman's assets, but freezing Moneual's assets.
Technically as a independent entity, Zalman should keep on ticking like it has. This assumes that Zalman did not assist Moneual's fraud. Since Moneual had a controlling interest in Zalman that is a big assumption that needs to be checked out. Probably another reason why the shares are frozen.
What happened was that the parent company Moneual, faked sales near $3 billion, NOT get that much loans. They secured loans of about $600 million with about $300 million insured. So the banks will have a loss of less than $300 million (probably near that amount). Also even though the parent company is definitely going bankrupt, Zalman will probably get a court order to keep running after the parent company forfeits all it shares.
Not necessarily. Elevated prices act as a "release valve" on demand; the higher things are priced, the less consumers are willing to buy them. In the aftermath of the Katrina crisis, Americans changed their driving habits significantly to reduce the need for gasoline. Without elevating prices, shortages become complete scarcities, and this happens often in South American socialist states with centrally planned economies, such as Venezuela.
And a note about collaboration: cartels are a function of lassaiz-faire economics, not free-market capitalism; they skirt the organic supply-demand relationship of capitalism by introducing artificial price points, when price fluidity is an essential component to capitalism.
The world sure would seem more just if the banks suffered more, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The loans were made specifically on the basis of Moneual's revenue statements. That is, the banks were trying to learn from mistakes they made last decade, and were relying on audited sales figures to make their loans, rather than "it's a technology company, it must be magic" like they were ten years ago. Unfortunately, the company lied about its sales figures, and then the auditing firm confirmed those falsified numbers. I'm not sure why the banks involved "should" have known that Moneual was lying and the auditing firm was incompetent. Maybe it's different in South Korea, but in the U.S., that kind of screwup would put the company's executives in jail for many years, and would lead to crippling fines and lawsuits for the auditing firm (how's Arthur Andersen doing these days?), so income statements and balance sheets tend to be considered fairly trustworthy.
Furthermore, bank loans like this are almost always collateralized by company assets, so in the event of default the bank gets first go at anything left over. Only large, well established companies can get away with issuing unsecured debt without crippling interest rates. Secured debt is precisely why lending to a startup (the Korean parent company is only four years old) is not a "foolish risk." Seriously, think about a world in which banks were not allowed to recover assets from their debtors. Why would any bank issue a loan, or at least a loan without double digit interest rates?
Actually, you don't have to imagine this - just look at the interest rates on a credit card, which is unsecured by any collateral. And before you tell me that those rates are so high only because banks are greedy, compare the credit card interest rate to the interest rate on a mortgage. Both credit cards and mortgages are issued by the same greedy banks, yet one usually has an interest rate of 15%-20% while the other has an interest rate of 4%-5%. The main reason for this difference is the fact that the mortgage is collateralized by the underlying house. That is precisely why lending $200,000 to a couple that makes $60,000 a year is not a foolish risk; the bank knows that it can get most or all of its money back by foreclosing on the house.
And lastly, how would you feel if the same logic got applied to every other fraud victim? Do you find it just as easy to say that the victims of Bernie Madoff "should" have known that something was suspicious, and that those investors took a foolish risk and should suffer the consequences? Why should these fraud victims (and make no mistake, the banks are fraud victims in this case, according to statements from at least one Moneual's own managers) be treated differently just because you don't like them?
So by your definition if I break into a house and steal everything, then sell it at my store... Thats Capitalism.
Sorry, you are wrong. What they have done is not capitalism, it is fraud and IMO Theft.