Salesman at centre of Wandisco fraud fears

A BRITISH tech champion has been plunged into an existential crisis after suspected fraud by a senior sales employee blew a $15m (£13m) hole in its accounts.

Wandisco, valued at almost £1bn at the start of the day, suspended trading in its shares on London’s Aim as it revealed last year’s annual revenues were just $9m – not the $24m previously announced.

It comes just days after Wandisco said it hoped to secure a secondary listing for its shares in New York. Bosses blamed a sales employee, and said they concerned “received purchase orders and related revenue and bookings”.

Chief executive and founder David Richards and chief financial officer Erik Miller said they had identified the irregularities. Sources denied that the problems were uncovered by the company’s auditor BDO, and insisted that there was no connection between yesterday’s announcement and the resignation of Wandisco’s broker Panmure Gordon at the start of the week.

Panmure Gordon had a long association with Wandisco stretching back to its stock market float in 2012. Liberum replaced Panmure Gordon.

The irregularities are believed to centre on contracts awarded over the course of the year.

Wandisco typically did not reveal the name of clients when publicly announcing contract wins.

Stock market releases cited deals with a “leading information and communications technology provider in China”, “a major American managed healthcare company” and “a global hitech company”.

City sources said that Wandisco executives were much more “loose-lipped” during private investor briefings, however. The names of major corporations were regularly dropped during behindclosed-doors presentations with City stock brokers, they said. Wandisco declined to comment.

The company said that in light of the potential fraud, it had “no confidence” in its bookings expectations for 2022.

The Serious Fraud Office would not comment on whether the matter had been referred to it.

Wandisco, a “big data” company whose software analyses vast amounts of information to spot patterns, said on Monday it was exploring an additional listing of its ordinary shares in the US.

The company, which has headquarters in both Sheffield and California, had said it would retain its existing listing on Aim.