This Substack has its genesis a decade ago. From 2015 to 2017, Fonterra deliberately cooked its financial books in order to hide bad investments and artificially inflate its net worth and share price. These shifty shenanigans, in which Fonterra’s auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers were complicit, meant that dairy farmers who purchased their mandatory Fonterra shares over this period did so at inflated prices. More particularly, the book cooking significantly boosted the already astronomical pay of Dutch Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings, whose bonuses were significantly based on Fonterra’s share price,.
