Able/MFS

Arthur Anderson auditors for Able/MFS say the company is broke. They have found it has liabilities in excess of assets, and have refused to endorse its latest draft financial reports. So there’s a search for new auditors, about the tenth in less years? Meanwhile the company is under continuing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a record of irregularities in reporting going back two years. It has been unable to produce a satisfactory shareholders list and has not had shareholders meetings required by law, but its shares continue to trade on NASDAQ (National Assoc of Shonky Dodgers And Quacks?)

Other Able/MFS items:

• New York and Sydney investors touted last fall as saviors of Able/MFS have lost interest in the deeply troubled toll system integrator.

• MCI/WorldCom (WC) is reluctantly getting back into ownership of the company, recently having converted $19m of a ‘Going Concern Note’ (a debt) into equity to keep it afloat. It is now carrying close to $100m of Able/MFS debt.

• The official who reportedly got the telephone giant into this disastrous mess with Able, Rick Wiedinger, has left MCIWC. There was talk of kickbacks in return for delivering MFS to the crew at Able, rather than completing a sale to an MFS management/Sirit team back in April 1998.

• MFS has not bid on the largest projects in its field of business in the past year - Puerto Rico and Oklahoma.

• MFS was unable to get mixed ET/cash tolling to operate on the Garden State Parkway on the ramp plazas on startup, so the ET was turned off, the first known de-electronic toll conversion on record

• MFS scheme for financing the whole $500m NJ/DE consortium ET caboodle with violations revenues looks increasingly far-fetched and the NJHA pulled the rug from under it on the Garden State at the first sign of a political backlash, canceling the $25 fee that is at the heart of the MFS financial model

• Sirit is going to trial against Able/MFS in the spring armed with damaging internal admissions from discovery that make it near-impossible to beat charges of fraud and other misconduct.

• MFS is supposed to changing its name but has no PR person and the switch at MFS told us that Vance Cartee, CEO handles all press queries but repeated calls to him don’t get through or are not returned, and we were told he spends a lot of time these days in Atlanta GA rather than at HQ in Mt Laurel NJ and we can’t blame the poor guy for that (Come to think of it, we’d be a lot further away than Atlanta, say Costa Brava on the Mediterranean, or a beach in Rio?)