"The guy buying the company didn't care about the money hole. He bought a name, nothing more."
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I don't think that's entirely true. Partially, yes, it was a cosmetic acquisition, but I didn't interpret the buyer's nonchalance toward the new information he received near the end of the film to mean that he would accept a ~$400 million loss. I interpreted that scene to indicate that the buyer was not shocked by Miller's fraudulent and covert behavior (i.e. shuffling funds around to appease auditors).
Wouldn't the buyer of Miller's company have assumed, as I did, that Miller would plug the hole in the company's accounts with money accrued from the sale?
My inference was that Miller would place the lion's share of the proceeds from the sale back into the company's coffers.
The whole tenor of the film had to do with just getting the sale over with so that he (Miller) could make everything right again... as in, filling the company's accounts up with money that should have been there to begin with (i.e. the majority of the money obtained from the sale of the company).
I thought that was more or less given.
The question I posed at the beginning of this thread has to do with the conspicuous disappearance of the ~$500 million from the sale of the company; a disappearance that would occur if, as I have described, most of it was clandestinely pumped into the company's accounts. Ostensibly, Miller was to pocket all of the money from the sale himself as it was his company. But he will have been left with just ~$100 million after filling his company's deficient accounts.
Someone, whether his wife or the IRS, is going to be missing that money at some point, no?
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dhmason6155
12 years ago
Gosh! The poor guy. How was he ever going to make ends meet on a paltry $100 million?!
I've been going through your package sergeant. Do you mind my looking over your package?
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chicago85
12 years ago
His wife threatened him with giving him up to the detective unless he gave his remaining money to a foundation run by their daughter. She said she imagined he had money stashed in overseas bank accounts for a rainy day. And he was going to have to live on that.
She also said they had an unwritten agreement that she could live with his cheating as long as she got hers and he broke it when their daughter got too close. He argued he tried to keep their daughter away from any guilty knowledge but it didn't cut any ice with her.
He had bargained for vice presidencies for the son and daughter both. They acknowledged the son was stupid and could be given an office and empty title. His mother never mentioned the son so I guess she just didn't care as much about him as the daughter.
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boydigital
12 years ago
Right. But would he have to pay income tax on the ~$500 million?
I don't have any idea how such things work (i.e. selling companies for hundreds of millions of dollars), but if it was treated as personal income, wouldn't the taxes alone overshadow the ~$100 million he ended up with?
I guess I just can't wrap my head around the relatively tidy ending we're given. The implication is that he has come away virtually unscathed. But there's still the matter of the missing money that doesn't seem logically solved.
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polsixe
11 years ago
It's not really missing, it is being kept in Russia. It would still be an asset but eventually Standard Bank would write it off and the bank's shareholder's would pay for it in lower dividends. They were buying and selling companies so private income taxes and capital gains are another matter. Companies pay taxes based on net revenue.
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eYeDEF
12 years ago
"Wouldn't the buyer of Miller's company have assumed, as I did, that Miller would plug the hole in the company's accounts with money accrued from the sale?
My inference was that Miller would place the lion's share of the proceeds from the sale back into the company's coffers."
I really don't get your logic here. Why would he be plugging money back into a company he had already sold? That makes no sense at all. It's already sold. He no longer has any control over the company and its accounts and has no way of being able to plug any money back into it, nor does he have any reason to. Mayfield was willing to overlook the missing cash because it was all about appearances. He had access to the clients and business the acquisition brought and could use that as a springboard to make more money.
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boydigital
12 years ago
But he borrowed money from a third party to keep up appearances for the auditors. Surely the sale would have been void if it was later discovered that the company's finances were non-existent -- and certainly not as they were when the terms of the sale were negotiated. At the very least he would have faced personal prosecution for the illegality of his actions, once hidden, now glaringly obvious by the lack of funds. How do you not see this?
It would be like putting a borrowed motor in a car, allowing someone to drive and examine it, and then taking the motor out after you've sold it. (Oh! Sorry, the motor wasn't included! I forgot to mention that.)
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eYeDEF
12 years ago
It doesn't sound like you paid much attention to what was going on. I already explained the answer to you, but it's clear YOU don't see it. I suggest you watch it again.
Who would void the sale? The guy he sold the company to that's who. Mayfield. And guess what genius? In the last scene it was made clear that Mayfield DID find out about it. But Miller had provided the rationale of why this wouldn't matter in an earlier scene. Voiding the sale would crash the price of the publicly held stock that shot through the roof from Mayfield's acquisition of Miller's company. Miller even said Mayfield would be willing to overlook the missing cash because it was all about appearances.
You clearly don't understand how business works to think there would be any "plugging of cash" by Miller after he had sold the company and no longer had access to it. What a ridiculous idea.
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boydigital
12 years ago
Your answer is far from conclusive or satisfactory... sorry?
That final scene with the buyer of the company justifies bad business practices (temporarily moving funds around, lying about them in the first place, etc.), but it doesn't forgive nearly half a billion dollars in missing funds. (And I'm the one who doesn't understand business? Did you even consider my previous car analogy?) That's an absurd reading, and truly a massive leap on your part. Mayfield never said that he is "willing to overlook the missing cash" (those are your words, your assumptions) -- the implication left by that scene is that he's willing to overlook the mishandling of the company and Miller's illegal actions up to that point.
How in the actual *beep* did he not have "access to the company" any longer? Didn't Miller make provisions for keeping his son and daughter associated with it? By that time his daughter was already a freaking accomplice.
All we saw him with was slightly more than a gentleman's agreement in the form of a tenuous contract. No sale was ever shown finalized... we never saw the complexity of the deal that was made... Miller wasn't thrown out of his own building... we have no sense of the extent of his excommunication, or even that it had officially occurred by the time the movie ended. There would be literally countless was he could infuse the funds back into those accounts.
I don't actually care about answers to my initial questions anymore; it's pretty obvious there are no clear answers.
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eYeDEF
12 years ago
The only thing obvious is your ignorance.
"How in the actual *beep* did he not have "access to the company" any longer?"
Because he didn't OWN THE COMPANY ANY LONGER boy genius. I mean seriously, this is why your ignorance is so profound, because you don't understand what goes on during a simple business transaction. He made provisions for keeping his son and daughter in the business. That doesn't mean you still have access to the accounts, cash, and the books for your happy manipulation after a sale. Sheesh. How many times does something so simple have to be explained to you.
And seriously, your question has been answered already multiple times on other threads on this board by other posters. Just because you refuse to believe it doesn't mean it's not totally obvious to everyone else. Gear did NOT and had NO INTENTION of plugging money back into the company after the sale. That's NOT EVEN LOGISTICALLY POSSIBLE. He even explained the rationale behind why Mayfield wouldn't come after him for it in the elevator scene which went right over your head. This was NOT an open ended question that HAS NO ANSWER, at least not to anyone who knows anything about how this stuff works. So GET OVER YOURSELF.
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geearf
12 years ago
I don't get it, the money is already within the company.
He does not need to use Mayland to fill any hole in the company.
The hole is already plugged...
He only needs to give back to his friend the $412M that he owes him...
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eYeDEF
12 years ago
Where are you getting that?
The books were cooked because there was a 412 million dollar hole after the bad investment in Russian copper mine he could never cut through the Russian bureaucratic red tape to mine and get out of the country.
That was the reason behind why the books needed to be cooked in the first place.
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AlexMorgan13
12 years ago
in the director's commentary it said he understood he got cheated and made sense to keep quiet about it, and he could re-sell it for more later.
the hole was already plugged with the loan. the missing money is the one owed to his friend who gave him the loan, and he paid his friend back with the sale. the missing money is he lost alot of the profits from the sale. even after taxes let's say even if he has only say $10M left that's still alot of money, and he could always rebuild it.
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