The murky future of Chorus.

Dangger

From John McManus's Business Opinion column in todays (13/5/02) Irish Times.

Although Independant News & Media (INM) owns 50% of Chrorus Communications Limited, the loss-making cable television grou, it has opted not to consolidate its share of the company's 2001 losses into the group accounts "because the Group no longer intends to hold the investment for the long-term and accordingly does not excercise significance influence". If INM had booked its 50% share of Chorus's 36.6 million euro loss, the group's bottom line for 2001 would have been some 18.3 million euro worse.

We have heard that Chorus has been touted for sale for YEARS(thank you Adam!) now, however in the current telco market fiasco, it looks an even further way off. If this is they way INM view the ownership of Chorus, its unlikely that Chorus will improve it services or catchment for the foreseeable future.

In the same paper the Andrew Donagher INM's Company secretary has a letter published defending INM against sugestions that there is an investigation under way or being considered by the Dublin and London Stock Exchanges onto the acounts of INM for the year ending December 2001. "The company does not believe it is true and feels it is extremely damaging to the credibility and reputation of INM Plc".

dahamsta

We have heard that Chorus has been touted for sale for months now

Years.

adam

spongebob

.....describes pretty much all of their past activities as well. Their product and customer service were never state of the art .

nice to see they are still making promises their staff do not understand and that they will never keep anyway, that has been a consistent practice of theirs. Their website has been accepting expressions of interest in Broadband for 2 years now.

INM have an interesting way of trying to avoid the .com flameout by deconsolidating Chorus accounts from their books.

IF they did that a number of years ago when Chorus was availaible to be sold (as far back as 1999 I think) then the accounting practise if probably allowable....it should have been objected to at the time.

If they only just did it recently then the Stock Exchanges would be correct in detecting a very strong whiff of Enron in the Independent Group accounts. The supine Irish stock exchange will whimper quietly and say bwasically amaaazing Tony, whatever you say mon.

The London Stock Exchange may very well take a less indulgent view of this treatment of losses and could require a restatement of accounts although the trading volumes are not high and the listing in London is secondary I suspect.

Expect Chorus to be worth even less next year as their customer base goes to minidish in the absence of any good reason to stay with Chorus....such as Broadband for example.

M

Arboration

They lie allot.

Last year it was estimated that 3 months after my general inquirie(May01) The Chorus digital service would be available throughout the republic.

It has been over one year since I made that phone call, and I still watch 11 stattions of nothing, and 1 stattion of FFFFFFFFFFFZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ'T.(Which they say they cannot turn on in my local area.)