Posted on 06/07/2002 12:47:53 PM PDT by buzzyboop
PHILADELPHIA -- Adelphia Communications apparently overreported its cable television subscribers by about 358,000 by including all the customers in joint ventures it owns only a portion of, an analyst said.
Aryeh Bourkoff, a fixed-income analyst at UBS Warburg, also issued a client update today citing "the very high likelihood of a near-term bankruptcy filing" by the nation's sixth-largest cable company.
Adelphia's board met today at attorney David Boies' office in New York, a secretary at the office said. Adelphia officials wouldn't comment on the meeting or a potential bankruptcy filing, said a spokesman, Eric Andrus.
Adelphia officials also declined comment on a report in The Wall Street Journal that its subscriber counts were inflated by 400,000 to 500,000 and that the company kept two sets of accounting books to boost the amount it told Wall Street was being spent to upgrade cable systems. Andrus said they also wouldn't comment on efforts to arrange financing to continue operations in the event of a bankruptcy filing.
According to Bourkoff's analysis, Adelphia apparently reported as its own 100 percent of the subscribers in a Century-TCI joint venture of which it owns 75 percent, and in another joint venture, Parnassos, of which it owns two-thirds.
The analyst said he decreased Adelphia's reported 5.81 million subscribers to 5.45 million in his estimates as a result, and said that may relate to the Wall Street Journal's report that Adelphia inflated its subscriber count by 400,000 to 500,000.
Adelphia is under investigation by the SEC and two federal grand juries. With its bonds downgraded, its stock price collapsed and disgruntled stockholders seeking damages, bankruptcy attorney Richard Tilton said, "It has all the earmarks of a classic Chapter 11."
Kiss of death if I ever saw one...
It's a Money Laundering thing.
Try Cox Communications also. I dropped their Dish service about 4-5 years ago. but I still get a Statement for $0.00 due every month.
Gotta Clean Up that Money. BTW, if you're not up on Money Laundering, there's some good stuff on the web, try Google. Restaurants, Movie Theaters, TimeShares, etc. are prime.
Charter Communications counts my local cable system as digital in their statistics, but it's totally bogus. Charter is 100% analog in Arkansas even though the systems have been rebuilt. Cable modems are years away. Charter stock is going down the toilet. Maybe the Wall Street analysts are starting to wake up to reality.
This week Comcast switched our stations around....moving Foxnews to ch. 71...netherland, unavailable on older sets without a box...which you can rent from the cable company. When I protested, the service rep actually said that I should consider myself lucky to get Foxnews. It is good to have like-minded neighbors. We're contacting others. Comcast is surprised that anyone is standing up to them. How did we become so compliant as a nation? Rant over.
Not in Coudersport, I hope.
Me, too.
I had a problem once and their customer service was great. I say that about very few companies these days.
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