By: John Gray

At last we are getting into some discussion of the management executive summaries that clearly showed Livent was producing millions in losses, but reporting tens of millions in profits to shareholders and regulators. But rather than showing clear-cut evidence of fraud, those summaries are open to interpretation, the defence argues. “Despite the Crown’s assertion to the contrary, the seized documents do not speak for themselves,” Greenspan writes. “Certainly they do not tell the same story to every reader.”

Funny, they seemed pretty clear to me. The line that said “actual” profit/loss (almost always a loss) compared to the “reported” profit/loss (almost always a nice healthy profit) was pretty eye-opening.

The defence then goes on to note several alleged manipulations that don’t appear to make sense involving millions of dollars in “rollovers” and “rollforwards.”But these accounting transactions are not necessarily fraud, the defence argues. “Essentially the crown relies upon the negative connotation imputed to the terms “rollforward” and “rollover” by biased and unsavory wintesses to argue that rollforward  automatically means manipulation.”

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