To the attention of : Prime Minister Theresa May
Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA, UK
I have the honor to advise that the reputation of the British tax, audit and consulting companies Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers are currently at stake in Belgium.
I am discussing the business and accounting environment of this country in an article on the blog named “Is Someone Destroying the Big Four ?”
I discovered the risk when investigating the balance sheets of NH Belgium. The Lehman Brothers Bankhaus AG lent money in 1998 to NH Belgium, and question is if NH Belgium bears any responsibility in the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Bank in America. In other words : did Lehman Brothers become the NH Hotel Group ?
Enclosed is a letter to His Excellency the President of the United States concerning the Lehman Brothers Bankhaus AG lending money in 1998 to NH Belgium, which was previously called European Hotel Ventures Belgium. NH Belgium is a cooperative company with at least 9 hotels in Belgium that are part of the NH Hotel Group.
At the end of last year, I began to examining NH Hoteles in Diegem (Belgium) where in 2005 I found more than 40 interns from Thailand working in the hotel during more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. It was supposed to be an internship in Belgium with the Erasmus Mundus student program. All 40 students were lodged in an apartment of two small rooms, in Zaventem, and they were paid a salary of 200 euro a month.
One of them wanted to extend her stay and go to university, and by helping her I got hold of her files. You will see on the recommendation letter from her employer three different names for designating the hotel where she was doing her “internship” : NH Hoteles, NH Brussels Airport and Hotel Exploitatiemaatschappij Diegem. The number of names makes it very hard to find the financial statements and who the owners are. I gave up when I thought that NH Hoteles was a Spanish company.
I had a second look at the NH Hoteles, at the end of last year for understanding the situation in Catalonia, in the context of reworking the tourism sector. The name changed and became NH Hotel Group. Financially spoken, it was unlikely a Spanish brand. I made the startling discovery that it is a Belgian brand. And this is how I came on track of bigger surprises like the loans from the Lehman Brothers Bankhaus AG lending money in 1998 to NH Belgium.
A closer look at their balance sheets reveals that the auditing companies of NH Belgium were PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) from 2000 until 2012, and Deloitte from 2012 until today.
As these are British companies, I am informing you about their impact in Belgium and vice versa. I am discussing the business and accounting environment in article on the blog named “Is Someone Destroying the Big Four ?”
“Did the Audit and Consulting Industry Close Their Eyes for This Client of the Lehman Brothers Bank ?”, is what I question in the attached analysis to the attention of His Excellency Ramon Aragonés Marín, the Chief Executive Officer of NH Hotels Group, which I am sending on 6 February 2018. The analysis contains observations of financial mismanagement and breaches against the Belgian company laws which to my surprise the audit companies seem to have overlooked. Why ?
The purpose of this report is to launch an investigation into NH Belgium’s financial statements as well as it’s operations, but also to question the exact role of the auditor , whether the role of the auditor is compliant with the integrity and ethical standards for the audit industry, and under which exact conditions the reviews of the accounts of NH Belgium by Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCoopers have been performed.
NH Belgium did not even want to publicly appoint the audit companies. They were not making publicity for the wonderful job of the auditors.
Note that we only need one corrupt consultant to stain the reputation of a big brand, by helping questionable companies look better than they do, simply because they want to be stock quoted, in order to roll through the stock exchange a large number of investors. I would send a prospect client like NH Belgium out of the door, if they came to me to work out their financial statements.
Major international brands like PWC and Deloitte will do much better by staying out of businesses that would stain their reputation like Enron stained the reputation of Arthur Andersen. It is safer for their reputation to turn down offers to make something like NH Belgium look like a good company on paper alone. That is not their job, but that is how certain companies want to use the tax advisors.
Unless the intention is to stain the fiscal consulting industry, the fraud serves to roll the investors eventually, and this could be everyone including the people of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
Companies like PWC and Deloitte should be very concerned about the business environment in which they operate, which should be in favor of the investors, and thus transparent, not corrupted and fair.
They should continue to be very difficult about who they recruit and how they recruit. My observation in Belgium is that the company values are considered like marketing buzzwords, and not like attitudes which the client should find in the staff and the management. The best example is Orange, where I also worked. You will find my experiences at Orange in “If I Didn’t Have a Religion, the Orange Values Would be My Bible”, and in “They Hired Me In Only to Fire Me Out”.
Allow me to enclose the letters to Their Majesties King Philippe and Her Majesty Queen Mathilde of today concerning the pensions and the taxes which NH Belgium omitted in their balance sheets.
I have also the honor to enclose a letter to His Excellency Ramon Aragonés Marín, the Chief Executive Officer of NH Hotels Group, to keep an eye on the Belgian operations of the NH Hotel Group and to take radical decisions.
The United Kingdom is known for a strong and strict accounting tradition which many countries have inherited. I have had the chance to start my career at Grant Thornton and later I joined Deloitte in Belgium, where I fine experiences.
May I attract your attention on the fact that the United Chambers of the Aurum Helix Group has an Enterprise Consulting Division which conducts audits. Please view a few examples which caused spectacular improvements with our clients.
In the context of the Brexit talks, may I suggest to include an offer to Deloitte in Belgium to accept auditing some international organizations in Belgium to which the United Kingdom contributed for more than 30 years, or to change their name.
Thank you for your time.
Yours sincerely,
