Civil suit? I'd make the case this was fraudulent behaviour and deserves criminal charges.
By way of analogy, if I sold you my car with an added turbo charger yielding a 20% mpg improvement, but had the side effect of causing the engine to seize after 10,000 miles, which I neglect to tell you, then that's fraud.
Similarly, if those inventory write offs and other machinations to inflate standard business metrics at the expense of derived metrics then cumulatively that is fraud. Standard business metrics are used for a reason and that understanding seems to have been exploited to hide the true status of the business.
As a society we need to start doing a better job of seeing white collar crime as activities like this.--Of course I'm making assumptions here, but I'd expect due diligence would have created a paper trail that could be followed to find evidence of statements like 'we streamlined operations that contributed to our surge in profitability' rather than 'we aggressively wrote-off assets and dumped inventory to show a short term surge in profits'.
By way of analogy, if I sold you my car with an added turbo charger yielding a 20% mpg improvement, but had the side effect of causing the engine to seize after 10,000 miles, which I neglect to tell you, then that's fraud.
Similarly, if those inventory write offs and other machinations to inflate standard business metrics at the expense of derived metrics then cumulatively that is fraud. Standard business metrics are used for a reason and that understanding seems to have been exploited to hide the true status of the business.
As a society we need to start doing a better job of seeing white collar crime as activities like this.--Of course I'm making assumptions here, but I'd expect due diligence would have created a paper trail that could be followed to find evidence of statements like 'we streamlined operations that contributed to our surge in profitability' rather than 'we aggressively wrote-off assets and dumped inventory to show a short term surge in profits'.