No Greensill is different. Greensill was in a business to provide a valuable service to a sector of a business that was being ignored by the Big Banks simply because they were not profitable. Greensill's having financial trouble largely due to the covid-19 that has slowed down the businesses of his clients to the point of defaulting on their loans and the insurance companies bailing on him at the time of need (very typical of insurance companies, never there when you need them) but he had a successful business model that was working. Before Covid-19, he was doing very well and there was no fraud. All Greensill needs right now is this guy:Somebody to just give pledge their funds to tie him over this difficult period, something the insurance companies were supposed to do.
Whereas this Easterday is different. He was engaging in fraud all alone just for him to engage in financial trading that never worked. The guy was losing money EVERY DAY!!! For TEN YEARS!!! And he defrauded companies to feed his "trading business" aka gambling addiction. Hope he gets some therapy for his gambling addiction when he's doing time in jail.
Greensill:
- was funding businesses and people like Easterday who were issuing fake invoices:
“Greensill Capital’s administrator has been unable to verify invoices underpinning loans to Liberty Steel owner Sanjeev Gupta, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Greensill’s administrator, Grant Thornton, has received denials from companies listed as debtors to the steel group stating that they had never done business with Gupta, the FT report added.”
(source: https://www.reuters.com/article/bri...-underpinning-loans-to-gupta-ft-idUSL4N2LU4D8 )
- Greensill was financing imaginary/potential/future clients and invoices:
“The more advanced way that Greensill Capital worked is that sometimes it would sit down with a client and imagine who might one day become a customer of that client, and then imagine how much of the client’s product that hypothetical customer might buy from the client, and then Greensill would pay the client early for those entirely hypothetical receivables, and then Greensill would collect the money later from the customer, if the customer actually became a customer and bought things from the client. If not, Greensill and the client would keep rolling the loans over and hope that one day the customer would show up. ”
(source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...nanced-imaginary-invoices-for-gupta-s-liberty )
- was lending money to businesses who already borrowed money against the same invoices from the same companies that backed Greensill:
“Greensill, for its part, was shovelling money to companies backed by its own principal backer, SoftBank.”
(source: https://www.ft.com/content/70ba9c03-e207-4187-b62f-4b73c8fcac19 )
- “the group operated with an insane degree of undisclosed concentration to risky companies, exemplified by the Gupta exposure, while simultaneously trumpeting its (small-scale) contracts with big brands such as AstraZeneca and Airbus.”
(source: https://www.ft.com/content/70ba9c03-e207-4187-b62f-4b73c8fcac19 )
So even if Greensill wasn’t Easterday, he can be compared to WeWork with the dreamy ambitions founded on creativity, leverage, unsustainable business, and literally imaginary profits. Otherwise anyone is free to buy Greensill or start a similar business and back the same businesses Greensill was backing.