Qwest To Write Down $30 Billion

from the a-billion-here,-a-billion-there... dept

Apparently, Qwest saw last week's announcement that AOL was going to write down $54 billion and got jealous. So, they're going to write down somewhere in the range of $30 billion. That $30 billion is to take away worthless "goodwill" associated with their merger with US West. That was apparently a $36 billion merger. The quick math (I didn't even write this down) then obviously suggests that Qwest paid $30 billion too much out of $36 billion. Oops. Also, it turns out that entirely unrelated to that whole mess the SEC is getting ready to slap Qwest on the wrist about other randomly bad accounting practices.
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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 2 Apr 2002 @ 10:42am

    Then the FTC or FCC should get involved...

    ... and bitch slap them for their incredibly bad business practices. Have you ever tried to cancel a Qwest account? They block you at every turn. They will slam you in 10 seconds, but it takes two months to change away from them as a LD provider. We finally had to threaten them with a PUCO report to get them to admit that our contract with them had expired three months prior and let our service be moved. You ought to try to read one of their invoices: deliberately obfuscated, and overcharges are a regular occurence. I hope they tank.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Old Man Harris, 2 Apr 2002 @ 12:19pm

    No Subject Given

    Did you see the article about Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio in the Wall Street Journal today? The guy sounds like a pompous ass. It's too bad that the ones paying the price for his arrogance are the former US West employees. Nacchio has sold over $300 million of Qwest stock and Qwest founder Philip Anschutz has sold about $2.5 billion.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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