Is HLS at Risk of Being Delisted?
Accountancy Age carried a brief story in late March about one of the possible implications of Deloitte & Touche’s decision to sever ties with the animal testing firm — if it can’t find another accounting firm willing to take on its account, it could risk being delisted.
Deloitte & Touche caved into Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty extremists after just 10 days of harassment from animal rights activists. Are other big auditors going to want to take on that burden?
According to Accountancy Age,
. . . the Securities and Exchange Commission has said that if a company fails to file audited reports within the allotted time-scale, it would face being delisted from the stock exchange. ‘Cases are handled on an individual basis and extensions can be offered, but all reports filed with the SEC have to be audited,’ said John Nester, SEC Spokesman. He added that one a company is delisted, it no longer has to file its reports.
One would assume that the SEC would take the special circumstances into account here, but for how long?
Source:
HLS risks delisting in the US. Larry Schlesinger, AccountancyAge.Com, March 20, 2003.
Tags: Deloitte & Touche, Huntingdon Life Sciences, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Terrorism