Chris Bryant, Columnist

If Muddy Waters Is Shocked, You've Really Been Bad

The scale of the debt shenanigans at NMC is mind-boggling. This is a shockingly bad time for a private hospital operator to suffer a financial scandal.

March 11, 2020 at 12:24 PM UTC

By Chris Bryant

Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for the Financial Times.

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In an incendiary report dispatched from California shortly before Christmas, Carson Block’s Muddy Waters Capital LLC wrote that the debt reported by FTSE 100-listed healthcare company NMC Health Plc was “manipulated and understated.”

On Tuesday evening the company’s shareholders, banks and bond holders discovered the mind-boggling extent of those alleged debt shenanigans. Instead of the $2.1 billion of debt reported by the United Arab Emirates’ hospital operator last June, the company really has closer to $5 billion of borrowings, its advisers believe.