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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Snowshoe who wrote (43995)12/17/2008 5:17:27 AM
From: Snowshoe  Respond to of 219433
 
For Denmark's Entrepreneur of Year, Something Was Rotten -
Stein Bagger Pleads Guilty to Faking Software Deals; His Ph.D. Was Phony, Too
online.wsj.com

The saga has fascinated and appalled a nation that takes pride in its Nordic rectitude.

The chief investigator estimates the swindle amounted to around $185 million, a modest sum next to the alleged fraud of America's Bernard Madoff but enough to fuel a jet-set lifestyle of sports cars and French Riviera holidays sharply at odds with the Danish norm.

Looking for clues to what went wrong, Denmark's media have dug into Mr. Bagger's personal life, particularly his obsession with physical fitness: how he met his second wife in a favorite gym, how he made money in his pretech days hawking muscle-boosting protein products and how he hired a burly Hells Angels Motorcycle Club member as a bodyguard. (They, too, met at the gym.)

Asger Jensby, IT Factory's chairman, says he is flabbergasted by the fate of what he thought was a "real company" run by a chief executive who was "sharp, a bit arrogant, very articulate and extremely orderly."

Leading banks meanwhile are trying to figure out how much money they lost in Mr. Bagger's blowout. Danske Bank, Denmark's biggest, says its exposure to IT Factory, is 350 million Danish kroner (around $64 million). Also taken for a ride is a champion cycling team that Mr. Bagger promised to sponsor. Badly jolted, too, are the accountants who did his books and found no irregularities.



To: Snowshoe who wrote (43995)12/17/2008 11:55:04 AM
From: dybdahl  Respond to of 219433
 
It's basically a ponzi scheme, covered up using language like "Selling a software platform", "Software as a service", "Tool to convert existing apps to web apps" and "Sales to emerging economies". Oh - and a CEO who keeps things close to himself.

Basically it is the same as the Madoff case, just extremely much smaller.

However, in such cases, you always need to ask, where the money went. In the Bagger case, there may be organized crime involved. I don't believe that Bagger and Madoff are the only ponzi schemes out there waiting to reveal themselves.