“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
KPMG Upper: A Big 4 Miracle
KPMG’s Melbourne head of higher education, Mr Peter Liddell, is a lucky man indeed. In what has been described by respected medical practitioners as a “miracle”, his wife Kirsty – also the mother to his three beautiful children – is alive, and well, despite collapsing and enduring a 12 minute period without oxygen.
Ms Liddell tragically suffered the cardiac arrest, which resulted in the prolonged loss of oxygen to the brain (“cerebral hypoxia” – for the medicos reading), in front of both her husband and her three children at the family residence. She was later placed in an induced coma for five days and needed five heart bypasses after tests revealed a build-up of cholesterol in her arteries.
Mr Liddell told the Herald Sun:
I rolled her over and she had glass eyes, and her lips and earlobes were going blue quite quickly… I knew it was serious, but I didn’t realise she’d actually passed away at that stage. It probably didn’t hit me until a week later how close we came… The girls’ immediate reaction was, ‘Is mummy dying?’ It was horrendous.
Utterly horrendous indeed and we wouldn’t wish this on anyone, least of all a doting mother to a young family. However, we’re pleased to report that Mrs Liddell ultimately astounded doctors by walking away from the cardiac arrest, the 12-minute cerbral hypoxia, the induced coma and the quintuple heart-bypass, with no brain injury. A miracle on any view. We wish Mrs Liddell the very best in her recovery and hope KPMG is affording Mr Liddell some time away from the office to care for his wife and family.
KPMG Downer: Insider Trader Jailed
In mid-May, former KPMG Senior Manager Andrew Dalzell was sentenced in the Supreme Court of NSW to a 2-year term of imprisonment, to be served by way of Intensive Correction Order, after pleading guilty to charges of insider-trading. The ICO, which Justice Hall mercifully imposed on Mr Dalzell because the term of imprisonment was two-years or less, means that Dalzell will undertake a minimum of 32 hours of community service every month.
The insider trading charges stem from Mr Dalzell’s purchase of 40,000 shares in the printing company Promentum Limited in November 2006 for $52,369 using material non-public information. At that time, Promentum Limited was deliberating over the acquisition of MacMillan Group, another printing company, and Dalzell was part of the KPMG team offering advisory services in relation to the proposed transaction.
Dalzell resigned as a senior manager at KPMG two weeks after the purchase of the shares, ultimately losing nearly $3000 when he sold them (great trading, convict!). But this didn’t stop Justice Hall referring to Mr Dalzell’s conduct as involving a “gross abuse” of highly confidential information and “wrong and an abuse of trust”. Blotter acid, anyone?
KPMG Screamer: Group of Partners Vanish
We received the following comments from a KPMG spy over the weekend:
Hi Firmspy, Not sure if you have heard but apparently KPMG let go 10 Partners on Friday afternoon, almost 12mths to the day when they let go another group of Partners. Apparently it is Australia wide but have on very good confirmation that 2 were from the Melbourne Tax group. Staff haven’t been formally notified but clients have and are already calling other firms. Unfortunately I don’t have any further information at this stage
We thought it was strange that KPMG would decide to “let go” of some partners who technically own part of the firm, but thought the imminent ending of the financial year made the rumour more credible. So we pressed for more information and received the following intel from the same source:
I thought it was strange as well given they were making Partner announcements today which included 1 in the Melb tax group but the ones they “let go” haven’t been billing and their new head of tax is apparently ruthless… 1 of the Partners in question is at work, the other isnt but no one is able to confirm or deny the rumour and it feels like business as usual. It may be a case that they have allowed them to go on their “own terms”. Based on my experience the new FY will probably be best indication if the rumour is true!
Yes, let’s wait for the new financial year, but let’s not delay opening this case of Budweiser!
KPMG Laugher: Bernard Salt (Shaker Half Full of Cocaine?)
You might recall late last year we wrote about that old, irrelevant bozo in a dodgey gorilla suit KPMG partner and demographer Bernard Salt. Mr Salt, part of the thoroughly fortunate baby-boomer generation, made the following comment to BRW in December:
A big crunch is coming…Many Gen Ys think ‘Planet Normal’ is being pampered by their employer and told almost daily how wonderful and talented they are. But the oldest Gen Ys will wake up one day in the next five to 10 years and realise not everybody can be the boss and not everybody gets a prize in the workforce. They will realise their middle age is turning out not nearly as prosperous as they imagined… This generation has had far fewer career setbacks and never had to deal with professional disappointment in the same way as previous generations. I suspect a lot of employers have not had honest, transparent performance appraisals with their Gen Y staff and instead have taken the easy way of sugar coating things… We have an entire generation of workers who expect almost daily validation from their employer and for companies to change the way they do things to keep Gen Y happy.
Unfortunately for Bernie, it looks like he again mistook the sugar-coater for a “half full salt-shaker” in formulating his laughable views (ventilated in The Australian a few weeks ago), on a phenomenon he terms “Hotness Delusion Syndrome”.
This is the notion that there are 15 per cent more single women than single men at the age of 44, and as a consequence men at this time in life get to thinking they are more attractive than they really are — indeed, it might be said all 44-year-old men suffer from hotness delusion syndrome… In fact, what 44-year-old single men should do when they look in the mirror is deflate their hotness by 15 per cent to allow for the proportion by which single women outnumber single men.
As is customary for his cringeworthy groundbreaking demographic research, Mr Salt makes a very small assumption before reaching the above conclusion:
it is not possible to get an accurate market reading on attractiveness unless there is an equal number of singles in each age group.
But Wikipedia, an information source that exists without “seventy-five pellets of mescaline” provides useful info on a related topic, without the fine print. Yes, quite remarkably, Wikipedia contains an article on the topic of Mr Bernard Salt, however unlike Mr Salt’s literary catalog, it actually contains some pertinent info:
- The notability of this article’s subject is in question. If notability cannot be established, it may be listed for deletion or removed.
- It may contain improper references to self-published sources.
But Mr Salt wouldn’t create his own Wikipedia page and include “references to self-published sources”, would he? He’s not the sort of fellow who would self-aggrandise by writing the following statements in the 3rd person, pretending to be someone else who regards his work as notable (albeit contrary to Wikipedia standards) is he?
Bernard Salt… rose to prominence with the release of his first book … Bernard Salt is known for his tagging of demographic trends.
According to Hunter S. Thomson, the answer is no:
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
…anything other than demographic stats, wild assumptions and half full salt shakers! We naturally asked Mr Salt for some input into our article, sending him the following email:
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: IDS
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:33:22 -0400
From: news@firmspy.com
To: bsalt@kpmg.com.auHi Bernard,
Do you suffer from Importance Delusion Syndrome?
Regards,
FS
No word back from Bernie yet. Perhaps he’s caught in a galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers and laughers?
Send the Firm Spy your news and views!
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You’re only adding to Bernie’s importance by writing about him. Now there’s a published source to cite for his Wiki article.
You guys are a scream