I see there are no longer any investors in Noumi Limited (Formerly Freedom Foods) on Strawman. I’ve never owned it. I had no idea of the extent of the fraud and corporate cover up by the executive at Freedom Foods until reading this story in “The Age” today. Noumi as a business is still suffering from the former CEOs actions.

Are there any lessons to be learnt from this for other companies we own? What were the first signs of corporate governance going amiss? At what point were there clues the CEO could not be trusted? It makes me shudder to think this could happen with another company in our portfolio. Is it possible to safe guard against being caught up in this scenario, or is it unforeseeable?

I’ve exited a number of companies because I lost trust in the management, here are a few: Nufarm, Kogan, Rectifier Technologies, HighCom (formerly XTek).

‘Hidden factories’ and missing millions: Unravelling Milklab’s $590m corporate cover-up