Brazil is following a case that really drew attention: the loss of more than R$ 20 billion in the Americanas balance sheet.
It all started last Wednesday (11) when Sérgio Rial, who had just taken charge of the company, resigned after finding “inconsistencies in the balance sheet”.
In a closed event at BTG Pactual, Rial declared that the billionaire impact was related to the so-called withdrawn risk, which was not released as debt.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM), the drawn risk is a type of anticipation of receivables.
But why was it not released?
Well, it’s a little hard to understand, but I’ll try to be clear. By not recognizing the risk drawn in accounting, Americanas presented an Ebitda higher than it actually was.
For those who don’t know, this is an indicator that measures the company’s cash generation potential. And there are contracts in which it allows the creditor to anticipate its charges if this Ebtida exceeds a certain amount.
Therefore, the makeup served to prevent this anticipation of charges, and not even an abrupt devaluation of the shares, thus putting the financial health at risk.
The result was disastrous. When the balance sheet was unmasked, the company’s shares fell sharply, even though it acted quickly in a request for an injunction so that creditors would not advance on the company’s cash.
And what does this bring to learning?
In my view, as a manager, the first lesson is how leverage can compromise your company’s results.
In addition, another learning that remains is that when the business needs more and more money from third parties to operate, something is wrong.
At that moment, managers should restructure the business, assess where cuts should be made and even rethink the strategy.
There is no way to defend what has been done. In plain English, what happened was: they made up a gap in accounting to avoid bankruptcy. And in the end she arrived in the worst possible way.
If there wasn’t accounting make-up…
I believe that if this makeup did not exist, the managers themselves would have more clarity of the hole that the company would be entering and maybe it would not reach that point.
Therefore, the important thing is never to deceive yourself, and try to deceive others. How many people will be harmed now in this company restructuring process?
It is still impossible to know, as we are only at the beginning of the whole process. It may be, and I hope so, that the damage is not so great and the company manages to recover.
But the learning that remains is the importance of transparency, whether from managers, directors and also from the auditing company responsible for auditing the company’s balance sheets. In this game, there is no single culprit.
