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August 04, 2012

AU Mediation: Sudan will move South Sudan's oil.

Struck under an African Union mediation, and announced today in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the deal reportedly covers transportation, processing and transit of landlocked South Sudan's 350,000-thousand-barrel-a-day oil production through Sudan's pipelines at $9.48/barrel for a term of three-and-a-half years. Some hotly-contested border issues, however, will need to be resolved first. Until South Sudan seceded from Sudan last year, the two countries shared for the most part a unified oil industry. NBC: "South Sudan strikes deal with Sudan to export oil through pipelines".

(Jenny Vaughan/AFP - Getty Images)

AU mediator Thabo Mbeki in Addis Ababa today.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

NYT: Uganda's disappointing--and expensive--reversal on AIDS progress.

See in Thursday's New York Times "In Uganda, an AIDS Success Story Comes Undone". It begins:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda’s sharp reduction of its AIDS rate has long been hailed as a Cinderella success story, inspiring a wave of aid programs and public health strategies to fight the disease across the developing world.

But as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here on Thursday, the news on AIDS in Uganda was not so bright: A new American-financed survey says that Uganda is one of only two African countries, along with Chad, where AIDS rates are on the rise.

The reversal is particularly disappointing to health experts given the time and attention that have been focused on AIDS here, and the billions of dollars spent.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2012

The Oversoul on Crack: Burning Man is August 27 to September 3. Peace, Love, Absurdity, Art.

Burning Man Festival, September 2, 2011: Black Rock Desert, Nevada (Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2012

Pippa Middleton Puts the Big Hurt on Chanel Designer Karl Lagerfeld's Vision.

According to the New York Daily News, and several other sources, the head designer at Chanel doesn't like Pippa Middleton's face. See Karl Lagerfeld blasts Pippa Middleton: 'She should only show her back'. That's not the point here, Karl. We don't care about Pippa Middleton's face. She has other attributes which make us very happy to be alive.

A star is born.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:35 AM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2012

Francine McKenna in the Financial Times: Sarbanes-Oxley? "It has failed".

Happy Tenth Birthday--and R.I.P.--Sarbanes-Oxley. Publicly-traded companies--their boards, officers, CFOs, lawyers and CPAs--are not likely to forget (1) Enron, the once-admired $100 billion energy company that deliberately deceived its investors of financial conditions and profitability with elaborate and aggressive practices of accounting fraud. Or forget (2) Arthur Andersen, the 90-year-old former "Big Five" accounting firm and Enron auditor that suffered mortal blows to its reputation when it was revealed it had obviously failed to conduct ethical or competent audits of Enron’s financial statements.

Enron and Arthur Andersen quickly became symbols of unfair play. They were not, of course, the only firms in the period 2000-2002 discovered to have committed large corporate frauds that would disappoint, shock and anger both novice and sophisticated investors worldwide. In the U.S., and with the greatest of acclaim and self-congratulation, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) on July 29, 2002 in large part to ensure accurate financial disclosures, to shut down corporate fraud and to restore investor confidence in audit companies after auditors at giants like Arthur Andersen and other shops failed to do their jobs and mitigate their clients' accounting frauds. President Bush signed SOX into law on the following day, July 30.

Did SOX meet these goals? No, according to Francine McKenna, a well-known Chicago consultant, columnist and "accounting watchdog" who writes re: The Auditors, and who worked for two decades in America and abroad in two of the current Big Four accounting firms. And, as McKenna might add, SOX in the last decade has not even come close in achieving those goals.

So see McKenna's op-ed in the Financial Times this morning: "Ten Years After Sarbox, Time for an Audit of the Auditors". McKenna offers three (3) big reasons Sarbanes-Oxley has been a bust on achieving objectivity in corporate audits. One reason she gives--this is my favorite since I have been seeing this over the last 10 years on an alarming if often comedic scale in the larger accounting firms in one form or another almost every day since the passage of SOX--is that:

audit companies still encourage partners to sell additional services to audit clients. Roger Dunbar, a former E&Y vice-chairman who is now the chairman of Silicon Valley Bank, told a recent forum on auditor rotation: “There’s an increase in scope creep, of wanting to provide these ancillary services to audit clients. I am personally worried. It’s a risk.”

Remember [McKenna goes on], Arthur Andersen had a disproportionate focus on the huge fees it earnt from consulting to Enron compared to the audit.

Sarbox was supposed to eliminate this conflict.

Except for Deloitte, audit companies went back to being primarily auditors after the 2002 act was passed. That trend has now reversed. Deloitte held on to its consulting arm and it has grown ever since. The remaining three Big Four companies rebuilt consulting businesses they sold or squelched.

For the other two reasons SOX (or Sarbox, for you accounting folks) is a failure, see the entire Francine McKenna FT piece at the above link. (As we've mentioned on other occasions, London-based the Financial Times has long been run by brilliant but way-snarky Brits who like you to work for their content; in the case of McKenna's piece, they obviously really like this one and they want you to pay for it.) McKenna's short, reasoned and honest call-to-arms for real auditing reform is not merely refreshing and compelling. It is undeniable. We expect to see the sentences in her SOX tenth anniversary FT op-ed quoted, paraphrased or mimicked in the coming months.

Francine McKenna of McKenna Partners, LLC

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Dykema's Alex Craigie: "A Brilliant Suggestion 60 Days Before Trial".

See it here by Los Angeles-based Alex Craigie of Detroit mainstay Dykema. It's at his At Counsel Table, correctly subtitled "The Craft & Business of the Courtroom Lawyer". Commenting on a recent WAC/P post and Hull McGuire pretrial ritual, Craigie deftly improves upon it by adding a proven filter to prime the artful lead counsel for a win: focusing on jury instructions.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2012

East London Janus.

Samantha Janus, "Guys and Dolls", 2006, London

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)