Tuesday 26 January 2016

Tesco - late payment scandal

So Tesco have been rapped on the knuckles for late payment - see BBC here.

Almost a year ago I was writing about this here

Let's be clear - this was a deliberate breaking of agreed contracts by a large customer taking advantage of smaller suppliers.  Tesco are claiming they are undertaking "reorganising, refocusing and retraining our teams".  This is disengenous.  They knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it as a deliberate policy.  If they are serious about the apologies they need to sack the managers responsible immediately - all the way up to the board.  Don't pretend they have already gone, or did not know what was going on.  Fraud is a hard word but what else do you call signing contracts you have no intention of honouring?

People could have (and may have) lost jobs and businesses so that Tesco managers could claim inflated profits and cashflow, and falsely claim bonuses.  Those bonuses must be recovered, and the victim businesses compensated.

In the end the accouting scandal of which this is part might cost Tesco £500m in fines.  Was it worth it?

Monday 25 January 2016

Procurex North: Manchester 8th March 2016

http://www.procurexlive.co.uk/north/
Apologies for the lack of posting, but I have been rather busy on a number of rather interesting training programmes that I hope to be able to tell you about later.  They should be continuing throughout this year (and maybe next) so I do hope to get clearance from the client.

One thing I can mention though is that I shall once again be presenting at Procurex North in Manchester on 8th March 2016.  I shall be running one of the training zones (not sure which one yet), but more importantly Sally Collier Chief Executive of the Crown Commercial Service will be giving one of the key note speeches.  I'll forgive you if you listen to her rather than me.

Hope to see you there.