John Duncan is back as George Kerr!

I noted in the preceding post that I thought the person was mistaken when saying George Kerr abandoned the Torchlight Fund No. 1 LP . Imagine my surprise when said person contended that John Duncan is still at PGC and happily continuing in his old role as (Managing?) Director? I expected John Duncan to have surfaced by now, so now I know why he has not. He is still happily forging away at PGC; of course I’m not using “forging” in the negative sense of the word. Speaking of which….And I know you think I totally lost it. I leave it for you to decide. 

Before I continue note the following penalty section 36(2) of the Financial Reporting Act 1993

On 27 Sep 2012 PGC releases the company’s 2012 annual report of which you can find a copy here. Then on 3 Oct 2012 it re-releases the company’s 2012 annual report (copy here) with the following explanation, 

“Pyne Gould Corporation Limited (“PGC”) re-releases its audited financial statements for the year ended 30 June 2012 with amendments on pages 6 and 11 reflecting signatures corrected.” 

That made our friend suspicious, which went back to compare the signatures and found the following.

The first column below contains the “George Kerr” signatures from pages 6 and 11 of the first  released copy of the annual report and the 2^nd column the George Kerr signatures of the re-released copy of the annual report. The problem with the first annual report was that it was not signed by George Kerr, despite that it is his name under the signature. 

Who signed then you ask?

I say John Duncan!

You say WHAT!?

I say I said John Duncan!

You say NOOOOO!! 

See for yourself. The last row contains a copy of John Duncan’s signature from the 2011 annual report (page 14) and a copy of George Kerr’s real signature from the takeover offer (see pages 2, 28 & 29). 

  In case you were wondering, John Duncan supposedly resigned with immediate effect on 26 April 2011 according to your chairman Bryan Mogridge.

It reminds me of the line borrowed from the flick Forrest Gump and used before on this blog in a post referencing Baker Street Capital Management and is quite appropriate here.

Stupid is as stupid does! Nice one boys!

The above raises several obvious questions;

1. What is Duncan still doing at PGC, if he supposedly resigned according to Bryan Mogridge?
2. Why is he signing off financial statements?
3. Why is he signing as George Kerr?
4. Why did the auditors PWC sign off on accounts that carried a signature of a non-director and or non-employee, who signed off under someone else’s name? Notice—The directors need to sign off on accounts before the auditors, so PWC should have signed off on accounts that carried Duncan’s signature.

 The circus continues under the watchful eyes of the Board, PWC, the NZX, FMA and the SFO.

Finally readers report that the original copies of the annual report were removed not only from PGC’s website, but interestingly enough also from the NZX’s website. Secondary news services such as Bloomberg, Reuters, etc still carry copies of the original version and of course our copy, which you can download from the link above. 

Their could of course be a perfectly logical explanation for this error and I will readily apologise if it turns out to be so, but until then....?

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Cheerio!
jA

Anderson Cooper once said, I think it's a good thing that there are bloggers out there watching very closely and holding people accountable. Everyone in the news should be able to hold up to that kind of scrutiny. I'm for as much transparency in the newsgathering process as possible.