Caveat Emptor

If the members of the board of directors of Hewlett Packard are reading my blogs, as I am sure they are, do I have a deal for them.

No, not the Brooklyn Bridge. Its “sale” by George C. Parker, an American con man, back in the early 1900s, is water under the bridge. And it’s expensive; you would probably need a bridging loan. Yes, I think we can say that would be A Bridge Too Far.

Today, we read that the British billionaire Mike Lynch is to be extradited to the US to face criminal fraud charges. He is alleged to have sold his software company, Autonomy, for more than $11billion to Hewlett Packard. We are not sure if these were US billions or real, UK, billions, but there were certainly a lot of noughts involved. However, it now seems that this company was worth a lot less. In fact, some of the noughts were worth nothing.

Perhaps, when members of the Hewlett Packard board were at school, in their Latin classes, they must have been too busy dreaming of future riches and missed an important message:
Caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.

And if they had been attending to their business school lessons, they might have picked up another message, admittedly not Latin but still very useful:
Due diligence – a thorough examination of financial records before entering into a business deal with another party.

Armed with these two concepts, that have been around for many hundreds of years, they could have avoided the embarrassment of being fooled by a smooth-talking confidence trickster.

And my deal? I will write blogs for any member of Hewlett Packard’s board of directors to publish under their name.
A small fee will suffice; they can keep for themselves the large payments from the Times of Israel.