From TSV Hari
Southern Features & News Service Exclusive
Chennai, January 4 [SFNS]:Will yet another misused
and disguised Oscar Award [a.k.a Hollywood’s Academy Prize] be abused to
selectively focus on Islamic terrorism, financial scandals and a pure musical
genius called Allah Raakha Rahman?
Can this aid the sins of
shady international audit firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers [PwC]
[1] in India and the world
at large? PwC also counts the votes that decide the Oscar Awards.
And that is a crying
shame.
There is a lot more than
what meets the eye. It concerns the faith Islam and a shady company Satyam
Computers. [2]
[1]
The 2nd largest
global auditing firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), faces significant
challenges to its ideal of a ”vigorous global network structure” that has ”the
flexibility to operate simultaneously as the most local and the most global of businesses.”
Pending
litigation and new claims of negligence in the audits of failed Icelandic banks
Glitnir and Landsbanki, (the Icesave internet deposit account scandal), as
well as ongoing investigations and litigation regarding the fraud at audit
client Satyam in India, shine a spotlight on how the firm manages collateral
damage from “local” issues.
PwC is a
network of firms in 157 countries, 756 locations, with more than 223,000
people. As of 2015, 22% of the workforce worked in Asia, 26% in North America
and Caribbean and 32% in Western Europe. The company’s global revenues were
$35.9 billion in FY 2016, of which $15.2 billion was generated by its Assurance practice,
$9.1 billion by its Tax practice and $11.5 billion by its Advisory practice.
Gender employment
discrimination
In 1989, the United States Supreme Court held
that Price Waterhouse must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the
decision regarding employment would have been the same if sex discrimination
had not occurred. The accounting firm failed to prove that the same decision to
postpone Ann Hopkins's promotion to partnership would have still
been made in the absence of sex discrimination, and therefore, the employment
decision constituted sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The significance of the
Supreme Court’s ruling was twofold. First, it established that gender
stereotyping is actionable as sex discrimination. Second, it established
the mixed-motive framework as an
evidentiary framework for proving discrimination under a disparate treatment
theory even when lawful reasons for the adverse employment action are also
present. Ann Hopkins’s candidacy for partnership was put on indefinite
hold. She eventually resigned and sued the company for occupational sexism, arguing that her lack of
promotion came after pressure to walk, talk, dress, and act more “femininely.”
Following the suit, the firm
has received media attention due to its discriminatory labour practices towards
males as well. Although incidents of such labour marginalization take place
rarely, there were several cases of unfair work treatment.
Tax avoidance
548 tax arrangements
relating to 343 multinational corporations and Luxembourg which were negotiated
by PwC became public in 2014 in the so-called Luxembourg
Leaks
PwC received $55m from Caterpillar
Inc. to develop a tax avoidance scheme, according to an investigation
of the senate. $8bn in profits were shifted from the US to Switzerland which
allegedly made it possible to save more than $2.4bn in US taxes over a decade.
In Switzerland profits were taxed at 4%. A PricewaterhouseCoopers partner
who was involved in designing the tax savings plan commented: “We’ll all be
retired when this . . . comes up on audit.”
Willie Nelson
In 1990, the US Internal Revenue Service seized most
of the assets of Willie Nelson, claiming he owed $32 million in back
taxes, including penalties and interest. He sued Price Waterhouse, contending
that they put him into tax shelters that were later disallowed by the
IRS. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount.
American International Group
Inc
BusinessWeek said that PwC
was American International Group Inc.’s
auditor through years of “questionable dealings.” AIG on 30 March 2005 said
that deals with a Barbados-based insurance company, for instance, may have been
incorrectly accounted for over the past 14 years, because an AIG-affiliated
company may have been secretly covering that insurer’s losses.
BusinessWeek said that PwC
appears to have “dropped the ball” on the deals between AIG and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s General Re Corp.
General Re transferred $500 million in anticipated claims and premiums to AIG.
BusinessWeek asked: “Did the auditor do its job by verifying that AIG was
assuming risk on claims beyond the $500 million, thus allowing AIG to account
for the deal as insurance? That’s Accounting 101 in any reinsurance
transaction.”
PwC was also criticised by
several witnesses during the investigation into AIG’s collapse, after the
insurer was unable to fulfil its collateral obligations to Goldman Sachs. The
insurer was expected to cover the difference in value between the credit
default swap contracts it had sold to Goldman Sachs, however the head of the
unit at AIG disagreed with the valuation that Goldman presented. According to a
memo published by Business Insider, witnesses wondered how PwC was signing off
on the accounts for both AIG and Goldman Sachs, when they were using different
valuation methods for the swaps contracts (and therefore booked different
values for them in their accounts).
ChuoAoyama Suspension
From April 2000 to
2006, PwC’s affiliate of assurance service in Japan was ChuoAoyama Audit
Corporation.
In May 2006, the Financial
Services Agency of Japan suspended ChuoAoyama from provision of some statutory
auditing services for two months following the collapse of cosmetics company
Kanebo, of which three of the partners were found assisting with accounting
fraud for boosting earnings by the company of about $1.9 billion over the
course of five years. The accountants got suspended prison terms up to eighteen
months from the Tokyo District Court after the judge deemed them to have played
a “passive role” in the crime. The suspension was the first ever imposed on a
major accounting firm in the country. Many of the firm’s largest clients were
forced to find replacement auditors before the suspension began that July.
Shortly after the suspension
of ChuoAoyama, PwC acted quickly to stem any possible client attrition as a
result of the scandal. It set up the PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata, and some of
ChuoAoyama’s accountants (but most of the international divisions) moved to the
new firm. ChuoAoyama resumed operations on 1 September under the Misuzu name.
However, by this point the two firms combined had 30% fewer clients than did
ChuoAoyama prior to its suspension. Misuzu was dissolved in July 2007.
Tyco settlement
In July 2007, PwC agreed to
pay US$229 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by shareholders
of Tyco International Ltd. over a
multibillion-dollar accounting fraud. The chief executive and chief financial
officer of Tyco were found guilty of looting $600 million from the company
Satyam case
In January 2009 PwC was
criticised along with the promoters of Satyam, an Indian IT firm listed on
the NASDAQ,
in a $1.5 billion fraud. PwC wrote a letter to the board of directors of
Satyam that its audit may be rendered “inaccurate and unreliable” due to the
disclosures made by Satyam’s (ex) Chairman and subsequently withdrew its audit
opinions. PwC’s US arm “was the reviewer for the U.S. filings for Satyam.
Consequently, lawsuits have been filed in the US with PwC as a defendant. Two
partners of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Srinivas Talluri and Subramani
Gopalakrishnan, have been charged by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation in
connection with the Satyam scandal. Since the scandal
broke out, Subramani Gopalakrishnan has retired from the firm after reaching
mandatory retirement age, while Talluri remains on suspension from the firm.
Yukos prosecutions
In November 2010, The New York Times reported that PwC had
been assisting the Russian Government with prosecutions in relation to alleged
tax evasion at Yukos stating
“Then, in 2007, with the prospect of parole on the horizon, the same
prosecutors—with what appears to be the complicity of
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Yukos’s long-time accounting firm—indicted the two men (Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon
Lebedev), again, bringing a new round of Kafkaesque charges.”
A cable from the US embassy
in Moscow stated that the trial was politically motivated and that a deposition
in a US court by PricewaterhouseCoopers may show that PwC was pressured by the
Russian government to withdraw its prior Yukos audits. An embassy source noted
that if the audits were not properly withdrawn it “would greatly tarnish PWC’s
international reputation.” Russian authorities were investigating PwC for
tax evasion, but suspended the investigation once PwC withdrew the Yukos
audits.
Global Trust Bank Ltd and
DSQ Software
India’s accounting standards
agency ICAI is
investigating partners of PwC for professional negligence in
the now-defunct Global Trust Bank Ltd. case of 2007. Like Satyam, Global Trust Bank was also based
in Hyderabad. This led to the RBI banning PwC from auditing any
financial company for over a year. PwC was also associated with the accounting
scandal at DSQ Software in India. Following the Satyam scandal, the
Mumbai-based Small Investor Grievances Association (SIGA) has requested the
Indian stock market regulator SEBI to ban PwC permanently and seize its assets
in India alleging few more scandals like “Ketan Parekh stock manipulations.”
Transneft Russia case
The construction of the ESPO
(East Siberia-Pacific Ocean) pipeline by Transneft was
estimated to cost in excess of US$13 billion. A leaked report of the Audit
Chamber of the Russian Federation indicated that the total amount stolen and
siphoned from the company during construction through various mechanisms and
schemes reaches up to US$4 billion. A Moscow
Times editorial stated that one of the chamber’s auditors attempted “damage
control” by saying in effect, “Yes, money was stolen, but not as much the media
reported.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
was Transneft’s auditor and denied wrongdoing saying “We believe there are
absolutely no grounds for such allegations, and we stand behind our work.”
Northern Rock
JP Morgan Securities audit
In 2012, the Accountancy and
Actuarial Discipline Board (AADB) of the UK fined PwC a record £1.4m for
wrongly reporting to the Financial Services Authority that JP Morgan Securities
had complied with client money rules which protects client funds. The
accountants neglected to check whether JP Morgan had the correct systems in
place, and failed to gather sufficient evidence to form opinions on the issue,
and as a result, failed to report that JP Morgan failed to hold client money
separate from JP Morgan’s money. It is the greatest penalty administered to a
professional accountancy firm in the UK.
World Bank favouring for
water privatization in Delhi
PwC was found to be
unethically favoured by the World Bank in
a bid to privatize the water distribution system of Delhi, India, an
effort that was alleged as corrupt by investigators.
When bidding took place, PwC
repeatedly failed in each round, and the World Bank in each case pressured PwC
to be pushed to the next round and eventually win the bid. The effort at
privatization fell through when an investigation was conducted by Arvind
Kejriwal and the non-governmental organization (NGO) Parivartan in 2005.
After submitting a Right to Information (RTI) request,
Parivartan received 9000 pages of correspondence and consultation with the
World Bank, where it was revealed that the privatization of Delhi’s water
supply would provide salaries of $25,000 a month to four administrators of each
of the 21 water zones, which amounted to over $25 million per year, increasing
the budget by over 60% and water taxes 9 times.
The Delhi
Jal Board (DJB), which administers the water system of Delhi, was
first approached by Parivartan in November 2004, following a report by the
newspaper The Asian Age, where the scheme was revealed to the
public for the first time.
The DJB denied the existence
of the project, but after an appeal, the RTI request was granted. The documents
revealed that the project began in 1998, in complete secrecy within the DJB
administration. The DJB approached the World Bank for a loan to improve the
water system, which it approved, and the effort began with a $2.5 million
consultation loan. The Delhi government could have easily provided the money,
and the interest rate of 12% that was to be loaned by the World Bank could have
been raised on capital markets for 6%.
Following the consultation,
35 multi-national companies bid, of which six were to be short listed. When PwC
was in 10th place, the World Bank said that at least one company should be from
a developing country, and since PwC made the bid from its Kolkata office,
it was dubbed an “Indian” company, and its rank was dropped to 6th.
When PwC failed in the
second round, the World Bank pressured the DJB to start over with a fresh round
of bidding. Only one company succeeded in the new round that was not PwC, and
the World Bank had the lowest marks from an evaluator thrown out. The contract
was awarded to PwC in 2001.
Following the investigation
by Parivartan, a campaign was waged by Kejriwal, Aruna Roy,
and other activists across Delhi, and the DJB withdrew the loan application to
the World Bank.
Cattles
In 2013 Cattles plc
brought a legal action against PwC in the UK in respect of the 2006 and 2007
audits claiming that they had failed to carry out adequate investigations. Cattles,
a UK consumer finance company, later discovered control weaknesses which caused
its loan book to be materially overstated in its balance sheet; having been
listed as a FTSE250 company, it subsequently lost its listing. PwC disputed
this legal claim. The claim was settled out of court on undisclosed terms.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC)
issued a fine of £2.3m on PwC and ordered the firm to pay £750,000 costs
following their investigation of the 2007 audits of Cattles and its principal
trading subsidiary. PwC admitted their “conduct fell significantly short of the
standards reasonably to be expected of a member firm” in respect of the 2007
financial statements. The FRC said that PwC had insufficient audit evidence as
to the adequacy of loan loss provisions.
PCAOB report on audit
inspections
The Public Company Accounting
Oversight Board (PCAOB) report on audit work carried out by PwC in
2012 in respect of US public companies identified significant deficiencies in
21 of 52 audits examined. The PCAOB report on work carried out in 2013
identified significant deficiencies in 19 of 59 audits examined.
Quinn Insurance
PwC Ireland is being sued by
the joint administrators of Quinn Insurance Limited (QIL) for €1bn. Having been
audited by PwC for the years 2005 to 2008, QIL went into administration in
2010. The administrators allege that PwC should have identified a material
understatement of QIL’s provisions for claims.
Connaught plc
Connaught
plc, a UK former FTSE 250 Index outsourcing company operating in
property maintenance for the social housing and public sector, was put into
administration on 2010 after reporting material losses. The Financial Reporting
Council (FRC) is investigating the conduct of PwC and its senior statutory
auditor in respect of the 2009 audit. In 2015 the FRC issued a formal
disciplinary complaint against PwC.
Tesco
In 2014 Tesco, a UK
retailer, announced that it had overstated profits by £263m, amongst other
things by misreporting discounts with suppliers. The Financial Reporting
Council has started an investigation into accounting practices at Tesco and
into the conduct of PwC in carrying out its audits in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Two
members of Tesco’s Audit Committee, responsible for monitoring Tesco’s
relationship wth its auditors, had themselves previously worked for PwC,
including its chairman, Ken Hanna; he later stood down. In 2015 PwC were
replaced as auditors of Tesco, ending a 32-year engagement, following a tender
process to which they did not participate.
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ
In 2014, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ was
investigated by New York banking regulators over its role in routing payments
for Iranian customers through its New York branch in violation of U.S.
sanctions. It was found that PwC had altered an investigation report on the
issue; PwC itself was fined $25 million in relation to the matter.
Petrobras Brazil
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation by Microsoft founder Bill Gates has
sued Petrobras and
accounting firm PwC Brazil arm over investment losses due to corruption at the
Brazilian oil company. The filings have also alleged that PwC’s Brazil
affiliate, PricewaterhouseCoopers Auditores Independentes, played a significant
role by attesting to Petrobras financial statements and ignoring warnings.
BHS
PwC in the UK is being
investigated by the Financial Reporting Council over its conduct in relation to
the audit of BHS for the year to 30 August 2014. PwC
completed their audit of financial statements in which BHS was described as a
going concern days before its sale for £1 to a consortium with no retail
experience. BHS collapsed the following year with a substantial deficit in its
pension fund.
MF Global malpractice
lawsuit
In 2016, United States federal judge rejected
PwC’s bid to dismiss a $1 billion lawsuit accusing the accounting firm of
professional malpractice for helping cause the October 2011 bankruptcy of MF
Global Holdings Ltd, a brokerage once run by former New Jersey Governor Jon
Corzine
[2]
Raju and the gang of criminal international accounting firms succeeded in extracting vengeance against Lakshminarayana.
Private sector foreign banks have ‘sold’ their bad debts of small borrowers to private banks in India. Citi Financial sold its debts to Kotak Mahindra that has begun hounding those hurt by the financial downturn. Obviously, none is going to take a close look at how Satyam Computers morphed into Mahindra Satyam! Incidentally, close relatives of Ramalinga Raju of Satyam ill-fame have begun a business venture in Hyderabad. One of its mainstays is a man who had forged the Satyam fraud into the sweet Mahindra Satyam deal!
September 2008
Satyam scam began hitting
the headlines.
Raju was accused of
falsifying accounts and boosting the company’s health in the balance sheet by
US$ 1 billion.
In what seemed totally
unconnected incident, three Indians – A.R. Rahman, Resul Pookkutty and Gulzar [the first two are
Muslims - converted and born respectively and the third’s real name is
Sampooran Singh Kalra [an ‘Arora’ Sikh by birth] whose more famous name is an
Islamic nom-de-plume] were nominated several times for the Oscars.
February 2009
Against all odds, Rahman,
Pookkutty and Gulzar won two, one and one Oscars respectively.
After receiving the award
for his song “Jai Ho” for the movie Slumdog Millionaire, from the podium,
Rahman exhorted the world to “turn to peace and eschew war.”
PwC
was the auditor for not only Satyam but also continues to count the votes for
the Oscars.
The worst global economic
downturn ever had begun August 2008 which affected the Middle-East [already
seething over what the Islamic world sees the West’s double standards by
branding its faith as the origin of terrorism] but “Islamic” oil is the
international industrial lifeline amounting to roughly 35% of the current
global supplies.
And because of such a large
chunk of what makes the gigantic global machine work, Islamic wealth accounts
for roughly 18% of the world’s wealth, something that can never be wished away
or destroyed just like that!
The anger against what
happened in Iraq, is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan what may, in all
likelihood, happen in Iran, had created the potential situation of every
Islamic nation creating its own versions of home grown Osama Bin Ladens.
So the globe’s multiple Islamic
national crescents’ decision makers and the general laity had to be quietly
albeit indirectly told that the first world is prepared to do business with
Muslims but is only against terrorism. “Change and/or Convert to peace and turn
away from the attitude of being totally sold on war,” was the message that had
to be conveyed - in one quick, all pervasive, clever move.
Taking out advertisements in
newspapers, television channels, public news conferences, whispering campaigns,
posted newsletters and cold diplomatic calls were out the question. So one
major event was needed to keep the Islamic world focussed on, build up its
hopes and deliver the results the Islamic believers wanted.
At that point in time, there
were 3 Islamic names in the Oscars - and no Asian other than the late Satyajit
Ray had ever won it. Even Ray had been given one only for a “lifetime
achievement” and never for a particular film.
It is difficult to imagine
that PwC economists – the best in the world – would have been naive enough to
let such a golden opportunity slip.
So, did someone somewhere
strike a multiple quid pro quo to allow PwC to ‘honourably fade away’ from the
“bad publicity?”
Did PwC facilitate Satyam’s
changing hands seamlessly to save the bulk of its work force and asset in
return for doing the first world a favour by ensuring the three media
personalities Rahman, Resul and Gulzar won Oscars beating all odds?
One must remember that
Slumdog Millionaire was all but scheduled to be directly released into the DVD
circuit as it had no buyers.
Rahman never considered the
music scored for the movie as his best.
He said so repeatedly in
public interviews.
A.R. Rahman who had
converted to Islam from Hinduism got two awards.
The born Muslim Resul
Pookkutty and the person with the Islamic pen name - Gulzar get one each.
Sikhism is religiously
considered a bridge between Hinduism and Islam.
And Lt General Jagjit
Singh AURORA [the same religious denominational origin as Gulzar] was a
Sikh who defeated the entire Pakistani army stationed in what is now
Bangladesh!
The innate message:
“Convert [to peace] and you
will be nicely awarded.”
“Meanwhile, here are samples
[like what Resul and Gulzar received] to discern what beckons the original
Muslims – ones born into that religion”.
Tellingly, the Islamic world
was lulled into ‘a kind of peaceful complacency’ between February and August
2009.
The blue-chip auditing
company PwC has all but beaten the rap!
CBI sources maintain that
all Raju is being questioned on all the above aspects.
Other FACTS
Europe and America account
for about 81% of PwC’s annual revenue.
Europe alone accounts for
45% of this inflow.
The firm’s dominant
practice, auditing, accounts for over 50% of PwC’s revenue.
As of March 2005,
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ audit clients included four of the 10 largest public
companies in the United States including Exxon, Mobil, Ford, ChevronTexaco and
IBM and GlaxoSmithKline, Royal Dutch Shell, Barclays and Lloyds TSB in the
United Kingdom.
PwC also audits 40% of FTSE
100 Index firms and 45 percent of Fortune 1000 energy companies.
The Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences – the owners of Oscar Awards vide various avatars since
1934, accords PwC a unique distinction of being the tabulator and certifier of
the number of votes garnered by each film entered into various categories for
the Academy Awards.
April 2009
Tech Mahindra Ltd won the
Satyam bid bettering Wilbur Ross and Larsen & Toubro Ltd and plumbing US$
579 million.
TML paid Rs.59 per share
while just a year back, a Satyam share was worth nearly 10 times that amount.
Shares of TML [31 percent
owned by BT Group PLC] rose by 12% on the Indian bourses.
Satyam’s financials are
being reviewed by KPMG and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu as the company’s former
auditors Price Waterhouse Coopers were no longer considered reliable.
Charges of fraud were filed
against Raju and a few PWC officials.
Evidence: Bloomberg April 13
2009
July 2009
PWC may be blacklisted in
India
The Institute of Chartered
Accountants of Indi [ICAI] a, a Tax Guru report said, was likely to recommend
blacklisting of Price Waterhouse, and bar the global audit firm from carrying
on its enterprises in India.
The report recalled that a
Japanese audit firm affiliated to PricewaterhouseCoopers had been similarly
treated upon receipt of charges of tampering with clients’ accounts in 2006.
In its independent probe
into the Satyam fraud case, the ICAI, which is the nodal body for accountants
and auditors in the country, has found the two auditors, Subramani
Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas Talluri, were not carrying out adequate due
diligence while auditing the books of the software major.
Satyam Computer, now called
Mahindra Satyam, is an SEC-registered company.
The fraud, which encompassed
many aspects including banking, debtor information and HR issues, was, at its
core, related to forged bank documents.
It is widely speculated that
the former Satyam management kept money in a current account and showed it as
fixed assets instead of bank balance by creating false receipts. This is one of
the aspects being looked into by the CBI.
Price Waterhouse, however,
maintained that it has “seen no evidence from any source that indicates that
the two Price Waterhouse audit partners who worked on the Satyam audit, were
complicit in or otherwise aware of the Satyam fraud.”
ICAI regulations prohibit
foreign firms from using their own names in India, most global firms operate
through local firms.
According to Indian auditing
circles, the PricewaterhouseCoopers audit network consists of 10 firms, three
Price Waterhouse firms, four firms named Price Waterhouse & Co, two Dalal
& Shah firms and one firm called Lovelock & Lewes.
Each firm is a separate
partnership firm with a maximum of 20 partners each.
Each firm has a head office
and several branch offices.
Price Waterhouse, Bangalore,
was the firm that audited the Satyam account.
This firm had branch offices
in several cities including Hyderabad, where the fraud was discovered.
The two auditors were
partners of Price Waterhouse, Bangalore.
March 2010
The US accounting watchdog
has imposed sanctions against two Indian auditors who were affiliated with
PricewaterhouseCoopers after they failed to detect at multi-year fraud at
Indian technology services company Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
Satyam, since renamed
Mahindra Satyam, was hit by India’s largest corporate scandal when its founder
and chairman quit in January 2009, revealing profits had been overstated for
years.
An Indian affiliate of PwC
called Lovelock & Lewes had been Satyam’s auditors at the time.
The Public Company
Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a US agency responsible for monitoring
audit firms, said it would bar two accountants responsible for the Satyam
audits from “being an associated person of a registered public accounting
firm,” according to documents dated March 16.
The PCAOB, which was given
authority to investigate audit firms as part of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley
reforms, said the auditors, Siva Prasad Pulavarthi, 43, and Chintapatla
Ravindernath, 38, had not cooperated with a PCAOB investigation into the fraud.
Prasad and Ravindernath, who
were each engagement managers on Satyam’s audits for several years, resigned
from Lovelock in January 2010 and around the same time said through their
attorneys they would not comply with the PCAOB’s demands for their testimony,
according to the PCAOB documents.
Attorneys for the two
auditors could not be immediately located, but the PCAOB documents said the two
had submitted settlement offers to the Board, without admitting or denying
their role, and consented to the sanctions.
The fraud, in which Satyam’s founder revealed he had overstated the company’s
cash balance by $1 billion, left Satyam struggling for survival. In April 2009,
Tech Mahindra Ltd won an auction for a controlling stake in the troubled
company.
PricewaterhouseCoopers said
in January 2009 that all Satyam audit reports from 2000 through 2008 should no
longer relied upon.
[Source Reuters]
