RE:Re:Re;Re; " Some of you idiots.."rockcod wrote: Eric Sprott has also had this time to consider possibly producing collector coins .)
That's the Eric Sprott of Timminco fame, innit?
https://www.santangelsreview.com/2012/09/04/how-eric-sprott-got-solar-burn/
How Eric Sprott got Solar Burn
September 4, 2012
Eric Sprott has an outstanding track record and I have linked to his interviews several times on this site. In general, I find him to be an independent thinker and someone well worth listening to.
With that being said, the story of why his firm bought 17 percent of Timminco, a Canadian solar wafer producer that ended up going bankrupt is fascinating. Most interesting are the many warning signs that were ignored. Here are a few straight out of the article:
1) The CEO had a murky past:
Heinz Schimmelbusch had been, more than a decade before, CEO of Metallgesellschaft AG. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Austrian-born Schimmelbusch was a dashing business leader and a confidant of German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Schimmelbusch envisioned Frankfurt-based Metallgesellschaft as a world-beating metals giant and a German corporate champion. We are a miniature version of Mitsubishi, he told BusinessWeek in 1990. With environmental services and materials technology, it will be very difficult to make this company unstable.
Under Schimmelbuschs direction, Metallgesellschaft went on a $2-billion (U.S.) acquisition spree and soon comprised some 258 companies around the world. But the mini-Mitsubishi story ended abruptly in 1993, when Metallgesellschaft suffered a loss of $1.1-billion (U.S.) stemming from a wrong-way bet of Schimmelbuschs on oil futures. The firm nearly went bankrupt and Schimmelbusch was out as CEO.