Is General Electric placing its chips on clean tech?
The conglomerate’s announcement today that it is considering a spin-off of its entire consumer and industrial division—and not just the appliance bits, as earlier reported—meshes with noises coming out of GE all year spelling a bigger emphasis on one part of the business that grows and makes money—clean energy.
Chief Executive Jeff Immelt’s been pleading for more government support for energy policies that would make GE goods from wind turbines to gas turbines more attractive in America. The company, already the U.S. leader in wind turbines, has been making bullish predictions for that business all year. In the hailstorm after first-quarter earnings, GE executives put on a brave face and declared the energy business was the company’s main growth and earnings driver....MORE
And from re:The Auditors:
News comes of another Big 4 firm with a big client with big troubles in Brazil. A few months ago it was PwC, potentially helping Cisco evade taxes in Brazil. Now word comes that GE has possibly been underpaying VAT by shipping light bulbs, at least on paper, to remote parts of the Amazon.GE's aggressive approach to "making the numbers" has been chronicled many, many, many times on this blog. And they get away with it, and with their poor internal controls, because they are still making money, at least on paper, unlike the other big industrial company known by two letters beginning with G.When will someone, anyone, call a bluff on the "good guys" act these guys have been pulling ever since Jack Welch was teaching them their dirty tricks?>>>MORE
