Oracle: Whistle-blower Complaint Highlights Opaque Cloud Bookings, Says Citi

June 2, 2016 Off By David

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

Shares of Oracle are down $1.57, or 4%, at $38.69, following reports late Wednesday that the company is being sued by a former accountant who claims the company tried to falsify its revenue from cloud computing. Reuters’s Jonathan Stempel, Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Sarah McBride report that a former senior Oracle accountant, Svetlana Blackburn, has filed a complain in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the former executive, claiming she was fired on October 15th of last year after she took exception with the company’s request that she “make Oracle Cloud Services’ results look better” by “adding millions of dollars of accruals for expected business ‘with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers’,” adding that executives above her added accruals on their own." Oracle released a statement following the article, attributed to Oracle communications director Deborah Hellinger, stating it will sue her:

We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance and we intend to sue her for malicious prosecution. In a note to clients today, Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard, who has a Neutral rating on Oracle, writes that looking at the complaint, it will keep alive some concerns about the opaque nature of Oracle’s cloud results:..

Read more fromt the source @ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/06/02/oracle-whistle-blower-complaint-highlights-opaque-cloud-bookings-says-citi/