“She pushed the envelope a little too far,” says Anat Alon-Beck, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University. “You fake it ’til you make it, but it was too much ‘fake.’”
The ‘shiny objects’ in this case can mean anything that helps investors make decisions to invest without doing due diligence. How about a ‘nice lunch’. A visit to grand offices. To help you get tickets to an event or even free tickets to an event. These are shiny objects that help you move past any due diligence.
What other lessons are there? In this case, there was a distinct lack of corporate governance and monitoring investments. Let’s unpack this a little.
When assessing allocating your capital for others to manage, have you checked corporate governance? Probably not. Even worse, is the problem of monitoring investing. Whether you use a private bank, wealth managers or other advisers, in most cases you’ll get some form of reporting. That is important and it’s what you expect. Yet the question is who is doing the monitoring?
Why is it that public companies are required to carry out annual audits? For fun? After all, the companies do their own internal managerial accounts, so why is an independent audit needed?
The point of impartial audits is to ensure there is fair measurement using an accepted process. Whilst from time to time audits get into hot water, for most, the process is fair. Just imagine if every public company or any private company could use their own managerial accounts, how many times would there be abuse? Even if the accounts were not ‘massaged’ it would still be hard to dissect. As such investors need impartial checking. Yet almost all investors rely on annual reviews from the same people who designed and manage their portfolios. That clearly does not make sense.
As Agrawal says “Investors should be doing much deeper due diligence”.