OT--SEC AND HARVEY PITT
<<<As accounting frauds go, the problems at Seaboard Corp.'s Chestnut
Hill Farms
division amounted to garden-variety book-cooking.
Division controller Gisela de Leon- Meredith had been caught
overstating
deferred-farming-cost assets and understating farming expenses,
inflating
revenues by a total of $7 million between 1995 and the first quarter of
2000.
When confronted by the internal audit staff, Meredith fessed up, and
parent
Seaboard, a Shawnee Mission, Kansas-based agribusiness, announced that
it would restate its earnings last August. Even investors, who held Seaboard's
stock
price steady, were apparently nonchalant about the fraud.
The case became extraordinary, however, when the Securities and
Exchange
Commission thrust it into the spotlight this past October--not as a
warning to
other companies, but as an example of good behavior on the part of
Seaboard,
which willingly handed over all of the evidence it had gathered from its
internal investigation>>>
MORE at:
cfo.com|83|5987,00.html |
