Asil Nadir [antikvár]

PREFACE 1 "'HE disturbing story of Asil Nadir and Polly Peck, the company he founded and built up in the 1980s into one of the largest corporations in Britain, will remain among the most bizarre business mysteries of all time. In the three years following Asil Nadir's first arrest in December 1990, enormous resources fi-om the British accounting and legal professions and the newspaper industry were devoted to finding the answers to three main questions: 1) Was the billion-pormd Polly Peck in reality just a balloon pumped up by accounting tricks which disguised a small-scale operation that sometimes scarcely made a profit? 2) Was Asil Nadir himself an audacious crook who took the hxmdreds of millions of poimds raised by the City of London for this artificially swollen corporation and then squirrelled them into offshore accounts for his own benefit? 3) And after he had been first charged with fi-aud and false accounting, was there a complicated plot designed to pervert the covu-se of justice at his trial? And was Asil Nadir himself the perpetrator or the victim of this plot? Despite all the time and money spent in investigation, none of these questions has yet received a fiilly satisfactory answer. For sure, the reported results of Polly Peck's fi-uit businesses in Turkey and Cyprus were exaggerated by the problems of accounting for inflation in Turkey, and then of converting the accoimts into sterling, the currency of Polly Peck's registered head office. But if the accounts were not really what they seemed to be when converted into pounds, then should the highly efficient London stockmarket not have identified the chimera for what it was, and marked down Polly Peck's share price accordingly? In the early 1990s a book called AccountinL[ for Growth., written