I have worked with an approximate total of thirty companies, mostly as an external consultant. With my skills, I helped resolve two major cases. I got fired twice. Ironically enough, the cases in which I got fired are the same cases that I resolved. I had indicated future sources of loss and legal trouble, and that is not always appreciated. In both cases, the improper conduct by management was the source of disaster.
No matter how precise and well-documented I was, management thought they were playing it smarter by suppressing information about detected breaches or losses and feared that this would have an impact on the company’s public image and on the share prices in the stock market. In both cases, the whole system was guilty of causing gigantic losses that eventually materialized after I was made redundant. In both cases, the public image got damaged and the share prices plummeted in the end. The company changed names in the very end.
One case was at a Dutch mobile telecom operator KPN Orange in Brussels where I
warned for bankruptcy and where I spotted the culprit. It was my direct supervisor. He essentially blocked the project information flow to the hierarchy. He fired me because he imagined that I knew too much.
After I was sacked, I prepared a report to the President of the Board of Management at the time who was His Excellency Diederik Karsten, with my warnings for bankruptcy, I illustrated it with tangible cases of mismanagement, technical disasters, internal power struggles, and the intentional destruction of development projects by rivals, the high turnover of personnel, especially in the company-critical functions like software engineering, and the impact of all that on the suppliers and the customers.
A phone call from the chair confirmed that my report was exceptional in comparison with the fake figures they received. In addition to the report, I sued the Brussels’ subsidiary. The legal advisor of the Brussels subsidiary who didn’t know that the shareholders were informed tried to bribe me to make me cancel the lawsuit “so that the shareholders won’t hear about it”. It didn’t work.
Consequently, the CEO in Brussels never learned about the existence of the lawsuit and he didn’t know the board in Holland was informed, and that they know what is going on in his company. He kept the status quo within the increasingly unmanageable Belgian branch. He grew fearful for the very powerful clique of bullies in the technology department and indulged in their demands.
The Dutch didn’t take any actions until about a year after I got fired, when ‘smelly dirt’ began to hit the fan at the Belgian branch, and spouting out of the building windows, like brown foam…no end
On one good day, Belgacom, a major supplier of leased fiberoptic land lines supplied an earthquake and made the entire Dutch operator collapse the same day. The supplier, who is also a Belgian government-owned mobile telecoms company, and a competitor of the new Dutch mobile operator, ceased the court of Justice to enforce the shut down of the new company in Belgium.
Apparently the Dutch operator didn’t pay his invoices for the leased lines for nearly two years and so he ordained the confiscation of the operator’s assets. Proceedings at law had started immediately and the Dutch operator in Belgium received 72 hours to pay an invoice of 300 million Euros.
There were no funds, no cash was available, nothing and all the banks refused to extend the already existing credits because the balance were very negative for years in a row.
The same day when the news broke, more suppliers suspended their services to the Dutch operator immediately, engineering contractors started to flee, the labor unions started a strike, and the hardware suppliers came to recuperate the unpaid materials like servers and antennas, which caused the mobile phone connections to drop in large parts of the country.
A massive number of pre-pay customers began to change operators right away, and even the cleaning company supplied a minimal service until it gained clarity of the financial situation. It was just like the end of the world, in one day. Former colleagues reported parts of the story and other parts I read about in the newspapers. It felt like reading a comic strip.
Find out more about the internal-driven power struggles which brought the company on its knees.
“Belgacom was actually looking to take over the Dutch mobile operator’s network and clients for nothing”, the voices were saying in the work place.
The Dutch board, in The Hague (Holland) learned about the misfortune through the news like everybody else first and then through the CEO in Brussels. They requested a top law firm to do what they could to oppose the shut down by Justice. They used the premise that the supplier never complained for two years about any non-payment. The bailiff – who drafted the fine and the enforcement order – rejected the premise as the responsibility for non-payment is at the client’s end, and not the supplier’s end.
Now, the board in Belgium owed an explanation to the Dutch headquarters. The truth was literally squeezed out, but still drip dropped in incoherent pieces.
At the very last minutes, right before the 72 hours term expired, The Dutch headquarters decided to inject a one and final 600 million Belgian francs into its Belgian subsidiary. The famous invoice for the leased lines got paid with half the amount; the other half disappeared in a huge pile of other smaller invoices and litigations that have never been reported before.
Then the owner/major shareholder took action. He fired my former manager, his director and the CEO who protected all of them. Many high-up heads rolled in the finance department, the sales department and in the engineering department. The company had to cut two thirds of its staff to avoid bankruptcy.
The new CEO was Stan Miller, who was the original founder of the Belgian branch and the largest shareholder. He found his baby in such a mess that it got him into hospital for months. Still, he insisted to correct the situation while recovering in the hospital. He kept meetings at a hotel across the hospital. Former colleagues kept me informed that the CEO learned about what was going on in a letter from some employee who got sacked.
My report to the President of the Board of Management of KPN was probably the only clue he ever had, and the basis on -which he conducted investigative meetings. He never revealed the name of the reporting analyst to anyone.
This new CEO is a young South-African billionaire. He changed the name of the company and changed its services, and then sold his shares. I think he will never invest in Belgian people ever again if destroying the work of everybody is what they do with the very high salaries they receive every month, which they don’t deserve compared to other very hard working populations in the world where they get 20 times less pay than in Belgium. Though, he sticks around in Belgium and he kept his CEO-job in Brussels… because the diamond sector keeps him here, so I suspect.
A few months after he took office, he declared on the news that the company was on its knees two years before. He will remember me, his North-African sister who once helped him in his business. He is on my list as an investor to be approached in the context of the Aurum Helix projects and to make up for the economic loss that I underwent in his company, 20 years ago.
I think his name is Jewish and I found other clues in the meantime that Alfons Nuyts is not only antiSemitic but also against all the Muslims.
Mr Stan Miller loves technology, he loves diversity of people and he has always insisted on interracial tolerance, and if I didn’t have a religion already, I would have taken his company values statement for my Bible. I have kept his booklet called “The Orange Values”.
Naima Mouali
President of United Chambers and Innovation Consultant
Founder of Anaccell Corporation
e-mail : unitedchambers@firemail.de
Phone:+ 1 541 366 4478
WhatsApp + 32 465 40 15 98
Twitter: @unitedchambers @meedanaltatweer
United Chambers of Commerce and Industry 