When times are hard in the big world of business, it’s down to everybody in the firm to make strenuous efforts to keep everything steady. No sudden announcements that can alarm customers or suppliers. No desperate baling out without taking good, reputable advice. And definitely no hiding one’s head in the sand pretending nothing’s wrong. There are some fantastic crime novels out there that have been made into films. Lots of them portray the worst kind of baling out action . . . it will very likely involve a huge company with an ever popular CEO and to the public facing side, it looks gloriously successful – lots of employees and smart fancy offices. But the main crux of the story is that underneath this veneer of successful trading, things are far from hunky dory and the boss is in fact caught with fingers in the till and many other undesirable places.
One such story line – regularly used as a plot, would be centred around a huge publishing mogul – and there have been hundreds for real in this country. A bullish character, larger than life and always with the gift of the gab. Away from the cameras and the pr machine, he would put the frighteners into his junior journalists and writers if they did not come up with the most eye catching headlines or best stories. He would always be very successful and you would never have know there was anything suspect about his actions – nothing would ever be disclosed in the press or on tv. Anyway, suffice to say it would turn out that his books had not been balancing for many years and somewhere along the line, he would be found to have helped himself to massive chunks of the staff pension scheme; there’s no doubt that this action has happened out in the real world, many times before laws were set in place to stop this. It never ends well in either the films or sadly, in real life!
