An Egyptian court has acquitted 14 policemen charged with killing protesters during last year’s popular uprising.
The verdict is the latest in what activists claim to be a pattern of acquittals for police blamed for the deaths of nearly 850 people during the 18-day revolt that toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.
A Cairo court on Thursday found the policemen not guilty of shooting protesters in front of police stations on Jan. 28, 2011, one of the most violent days of the uprising.
The 14 are among nearly 200 security officers and former regime officials _ including Mubarak himself _ who face trial for the deaths of protesters during the uprising.
With Facebook hurtling toward a spectacular initial public offering in the $100-billion range May 18, it
Iraq began loading crude oil Friday from a second offshore export terminal in the Persian Gulf, part of a major project to boost Iraq’s income.
Also Friday, the government agreed to allow ExxonMobil Corp. to continue working in one of Iraq’s biggest oil fields.
Dhia Jaafar, the head of State-run South Oil Company, said that the pumping started late Thursday from the terminal when a ship with a capacity of 2 million barrels docked near its platform to be loaded with oil.
The crude is being pumped from the terminal at a rate of 35,000 barrels an hour.
The new terminal is the second of five that will eventually handle about 5 million barrels a day. They will help Iraq to bring in sorely needed cash for reconstruction after decades of war and international sanctions.
With the opening of the two terminals, Basra export capacity has been raised to around 3.5 million barrels a day, he said.
Jaafar also said ExxonMobil Corp payday advance. will continue working in the 8.6 billion-barrel West Qurna Stage 1 field in Basra province, even though it has been banned from bidding on developing gas fields next month.
Iraq said that Exxon is not allowed to bid in the May auction of 12 exploration blocks nationwide because of its refusal to abandon its deals with the self-rule Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
The Texas-based Exxon signed six deal with the Kurds last October to search for oil in six areas, bypassing the Baghdad government, which maintains that it must ratify all such contracts.
“ExxonMobil has given assurances that it will sort out its problems in Kurdistan,” Jaafar explained. “Therefore, the government allowed it to continue working in West Qurna.”
Stocks in the U.S. fell slightly at midday Thursday as investors weighed stronger corporate earnings against disappointing economic reports.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 23 points to 13,010 at noon. The S&P 500 dropped 3 points to 1,382.
Morgan Stanley rose 1.4 percent after the bank trounced Wall Street’s earnings and revenue estimates. UnitedHealth Group Inc. rose 2.7 percent after reporting higher profits. EBay, Southwest Airlines and Bank of America also beat forecasts.
Stock indexes fell after two relatively weak economic reports came out mid-morning. An index of regional manufacturing compiled by the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve dropped sharply, and the National Association of Realtors said home sales fell 2.6 percent last month.
Earlier, the Labor Department said applications for unemployment benefits dipped 2,000 to 386,000. When the number is above 375,000, investors take it as a sign that hiring isn’t strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.
“None of these (reports) were disastrous, but they’re not as strong as we like to see,” said Brian Lazorishak, a portfolio manager at Chase Investment Counsel in Charlottesville, Va. Still, he added, “We’ve had good numbers out of some companies, so maybe we have some room for upside here.”
In other trading, the Nasdaq composite index fell one point to 3,030.
On Wednesday, U.S. stocks fell on worries that European efforts to help governments there pay off their debt could hit new roadblocks bad credit personal loan lenders. The Bank of Spain had reported that bad loans at the country’s banks had hit an 18-year high.
Before the opening bell Thursday, investors were nervously watching a sale of new Spanish government bonds. The auction met with high demand, and more bonds were sold than expected. But yields rose anyway. The yield on Spanish 10-year notes rose to 5.87 percent, an increase of 0.06 percentage point.
European markets mostly fell. Spain’s IBEX index fell 2.4 percent, Greece’s main index 1.8 percent and France’s CAC-40 fell 2 percent.
In other corporate news, Tumi Holdings, a maker of high-end luggage, jumped 47 percent to $26.50 on its first day of trading.
The U.S.-listed shares of cell phone maker Nokia sank 3.6 percent after the Finnish company reported a loss for the first three months of the year and a 40 percent plunge in device sales. The company faces fierce competition from Apple’s iPhone and handset makers that use Google’s Android software.
Human Genome Sciences doubled to $14.31 after the company spurned a takeover offer from GlaxoSmithKline of $13 per share, saying it undervalues the company. The biotech drug maker, which produces the lupus treatment Benlysta, said it would consider other options including a sale of the company.
Here’s an unsettling fact for anyone thinking of ever buying shares in a newly public company: Even if its executives know their internal accounting systems are a wreck, they aren’t required to disclose this until after the company goes public.
It is a lesson that Groupon Inc. shareholders have learned the hard way. Groupon shares fell 17 percent on Monday, after the online coupon company said late last week that it had identified a “material weakness” in its internal controls over financial reporting, as of Dec. 31. The Chicago-based company also revised its fourth-quarter results to show lower revenue and a larger loss, after finding errors in its accounting for customer refunds. At $14.54, the stock now sells for 44 percent less than it did after the first day of trading.
Given that Groupon went public only last November, the latest news raises the question: Didn’t Groupon know before its initial public offering that its controls were weak? A company spokesman, Paul Taaffe, declined to comment. Let’s assume for the moment, though, that its executives did know. Even then, they wouldn’t have had to tell investors beforehand.
That’s because there is no requirement to disclose a control weakness in a company’s IPO prospectus. Groupon would have had no obligation to disclose the problem until it filed its first quarterly or annual report as a public company — which is what it did. Sandbagging IPO investors in this manner is perfectly legal, it turns out.
Sox Hole
The reason lies with a gaping hole in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which Congress passed in 2002 in response to the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. That statute had two main sections related to companies’ internal controls, which are the systems and processes that companies are supposed to have in place to ensure the information they report is accurate. Those provisions apply only to companies that are public already, not ones that have registered for IPOs.
One section, called 302, requires public companies’ top executives to evaluate each quarter whether their disclosure controls and procedures are effective. The other section, known as 404, is better known. It requires public companies in their annual reports to include assessments by management and outside auditors about the effectiveness of their internal controls over financial reporting. Congress left it to the Securities and Exchange Commission to write the rules implementing those provisions.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Groupon reported the weakness in its financial-reporting controls through a Section 302 disclosure, not a Section 404 report. In other words, the problem was serious enough that it amounted to a shortcoming in the company’s overall disclosure controls.
Groupon won’t have to comply with Section 404’s requirements until its second annual report, due next year, under an exemption the SEC passed in 2006 for newly public companies. Likewise, Groupon’s auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, to date has expressed no opinion on the company’s internal controls in its audit reports instant payday loan.
Groupon’s IPO prospectus cautioned that future disclosures about control weaknesses were possible. It also said the company had only “recently filled a number of positions in our senior management and finance and accounting staff.” However, the prospectus made no representation about whether Groupon’s controls were effective at the time. None was required.
An SEC spokeswoman, Judith Burns, confirmed: “There is no requirement to disclose a material weakness in the prospectus.”
She was speaking broadly, not about any specific company.
Perfect Call
Give credit where it’s due: Two writers who made the perfect call on Groupon are Anthony Catanach, an accounting professor at Villanova University, and Edward Ketz, an accounting professor at Pennsylvania State University.
“It is absolutely ludicrous to think that Groupon is anywhere close to having an effective set of internal controls over financial reporting, having done 17 acquisitions in a little over a year,” the pair wrote in an Aug. 24 article on their blog, Grumpy Old Accountants. “When a company expands to 45 countries, grows merchants from 212 to 78,466, and expands its employee base from 37 to 9,625 in only two years, there is little doubt that internal controls are not working somewhere.”
Even before going public, Groupon restated its financial reports in September to correct errors in the way it reported revenue, which slashed 2010 sales to $312.9 million from $713.4 million. That alone should have flagged to investors that Groupon’s controls were lacking. Nonetheless, the stock market this week acted like it was surprised.
The debacle at Groupon understandably has drawn comparisons with the new securities legislation that President Barack Obama is scheduled to sign into law. The act lets newly public companies go five years without providing internal-control reports by outside auditors, as long as annual revenue is less than $1 billion. (Groupon reported 2011 revenue of $1.6 billion.)
The change comes after the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 permanently exempted companies with less than $75 million of freely tradable shares from meeting this requirement — which means most U.S. public companies.
The new law will reduce disclosure obligations in many other ways. Pre-IPO correspondence between companies and the SEC’s staff initially would be stamped secret, for example. The act is a lurch in the opposite direction of what is needed.
Let’s not fool ourselves, though. The existing protections for IPO investors were feeble before the new law. That Groupon could stay mum for so long about any control weaknesses it had, legally, is merely the latest evidence.
There is only one solution for investors who aren’t insiders: Don’t ever buy stock in a company that just went public.
Hammered by the financial crisis that has led to ever diminishing income, a group of residents in northern Greece have joined forces with potato farmers to slash consumer prices and ensure producers can get their crop to markets by cutting out the middle man.
Hundreds of families turned up Saturday in this northern Greek town to buy potatoes at massively reduced prices, sold directly by producers at cost price. They lined up in cars and with bicycles, on foot and with scooters to collect their bags of spuds from a truck that flung its doors wide open and was doing a roaring trade in the parking lot of a local courthouse.
Farmers say it costs about 20 cents ($0.27) to produce a kilogram (2 pounds) of potatoes, but that wholesalers will only buy them for 10-12 cents to get the crop to supermarkets, where they sell for about 60-70 cents a kilogram. Faced with making a loss, many producers say they have been unable to even get their products to the market.
Greece’s severe financial crisis, now entering its third year, has seen pensions and salaries slashed and led to skyrocketing unemployment of over 20 percent. More and more people have been turning up at soup kitchens run by the church or local aid groups, and homelessness has been increasing.
Faced with an ever deepening recession, some local groups have begun coming up with novel ways to beat the financial crunch.
Ilias Tsolakidis, 54, part of a volunteer group in northern Greece, said he contacted a potato farmer in northern Greece last week and posted an advertisement on the internet offering consumers the chance to order directly from the producer at cost price. He was overwhelmed by the response: by Wednesday, all 24 tons of potatoes on offer had been sold, with 534 families putting in orders.
His motive, Tsolakidis said, was “to cover a financial gap in the family budget. You know, the situation in the financial crisis has become very difficult. We help producers (from the local area) on the one hand, and also the families of consumers.”
Kiki Pantelopoulou couldn’t agree more.
“I didn’t only do this because it’s in my interest,” said the 42-year-old as she loaded a sack of potatoes onto her bicycle. “My main concern is how to stop this situation. This way, we favor Greek products and therefore producers can at least make the cost price.”
Tsolakidis said that with demand so high, his group of volunteers would set up another sale next weekend, buying another 24 tons of potatoes from a different farmer this time.
Konstantinos Karanikos, 67, said his son helped him order sacks of potatoes from Saturday’s sale over the internet, but could only secure half the amount he wanted because the demand was so high. “We will order again next weekend,” he said. “The important thing is for the producer to be satisfied and the consumer to have cheap potatoes.”
With the crop being sold at cost price of 20 cents a kilogram, Lefteris Kostopoulos, the farmer who put his spuds up for sale Saturday, didn’t make any profit on the transaction. But, he said, at least he managed to break even and sell more than half of the produce he had stored up in a warehouse.
“This group’s move was very good. It helped us shift the amounts we had in the warehouses, and we didn’t give them to the wholesalers who are asking for 10-12 cents per kilo,” he said. “We might not make money here, because we’re essentially breaking even, but at least we aren’t making a loss.”
Kalypso Skouba, 44, said she hoped the new movement spread to other products soon, so she could buy more vegetables or fruit directly from producers.
“I bought potatoes today just to show that it can’t only be the middlemen who make money,” she said.
General Mills Inc. is lowering is fiscal 2012 adjusted earnings forecast, saying it experienced softer volumes in the U.S. during December and January.
Its shares fell $1.43, or 3.6 percent, to $38.35 in premarket trading on Friday.
General Mills remains one of the most popular food brands in grocery stores. But like most of its peers, it has struggled with higher costs for everything from ingredients to labor and has raised its prices to help alleviate some of the pressure.
The Minneapolis company, which makes foods such as Cheerios cereal, Nature Valley granola bars and Hamburger Helper, said it now expects full-year adjusted earnings of $2 payday lenders.53 to $2.55 per share. Its prior guidance was for earnings between $2.59 and $2.61 per share.
Analysts polled by FactSet forecast earnings of $2.60 per share for the year.
For its fiscal third quarter, General Mills expects earnings of 54 cents to 56 cents per share. In the same period last year it made 56 cents per share.
General Mills plans to report earnings on March 21.
Sales at U.S. retailers probably increased in January by the most in four months, spurred by the biggest gain in auto purchases since 2009, economists said before a report this week.
The projected 0.8 percent gain in retail receipts would follow a 0.1 percent advance in December, according to the median forecast of 65 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before Commerce Department figures on Feb. 14. Industrial production jumped and the cost of living increased in January, other data may show.
The drop in unemployment to a three-year low is evidence of an improving job market that
Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond said U.S. policy makers should focus on fighting long- term unemployment because workers who lose skills present a bigger challenge than the country
The Sappington Farmers Market, which filed for bankruptcy Friday, will remain open despite its troubles.
“The reorganization of Sappington Farmers Market will allow the store to remain open and viable,” said Nancy Smith, the market’s manager, in a written statement. “We feel this will position us to be successful in the future.”
Smith didn’t provide an interview.
The store, on Watson Road in Marlborough, has roots going back to the early 1980s and has been at its present location since 1995, where it has gained a loyal following of bargain hunters and proponents of local farming.
The store’s mission has long been to support area farmers by featuring their products.
In her statement released Saturday, Smith said the store would continue to feature local farmers and would continue distributing their products not only through the store but through schools, restaurants and a “mobile market.”
The store’s founder, Tessa Greenspan, sold it in 2008 to a cooperative of small-scale farmers known as the Missouri Farmers Union, which formed a company called Farm to Family Naturally LLC to buy the business.
Farm to Family Naturally, which does business as Sappington Farmers Market, was the organization that filed for bankruptcy on Friday.
Members of the original cooperative who purchased the store have since left, according to employees.
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0