Originally posted December 2015.
While Analysts Slept: Spanish Schoolboy Spotted Abengoa's Impending Bankruptcy...
Following up on " Green Nasties at Abengoa: "How BlackRock Made a Killing From Spain’s Biggest Ever Corporate Meltdown""
From the Guardian, Dec. 14:
Teenager’s economics project noticed flaws in accounting a year before solar and wind power firm tries to avoid becoming Spain’s biggest bankruptcy
As Spanish engineering and renewable energy giant Abengoa struggles to avoid becoming the country’s biggest bankruptcy, it has emerged that a 17-year-old schoolboy predicted its collapse a year ago, spotting accounting discrepancies apparently overlooked by both Deloitte and Standard & Poor’s.
Pepe Baltá, a secondary school student in Barcelona, chose Abengoa as his economics project and noticed flaws in its accounting. “If it does not act soon, there is a strong risk Abengoa will go into bankruptcy,” Baltá wrote last year in his 18-page paper, titled Analytical report on Abengoa, 2012 and 2013.
Baltá, who is now 18 and studying medicine, said he was “very surprised that what I wrote actually happened. I only have basic secondary school knowledge of economics”.
“I have some accounting knowledge,” he told El Mundo newspaper, “and Abengoa’s accounts did not seem to add up. There was a lot of debt and few active assets compared to fixed ones. The big surprise was that negative profits were being converted into positives. I didn’t understand how they could do that.”...MORE
