> Vastaamo board fires CEO, says he kept [a previous] data breach secret for year and a half
> [The CEO's family] owned the company until it was bought by Helsinki-based private equity firm Intera Partners in May 2019, not long after a second breach of the psychotherapy provider’s data security systems.
It's the white collar equivalent of walking out the door of a dying company with the chairs and coffee machine -- so, naturally, a thousand times more destructive and a thousand times less illegal.
How does that work? I don't totally understand the chairs and coffee machine analogy
> selling a bullshit turnaround narrative
Does that mean that the PE firms pretend the startups are doing a lot better, than what they actually are? So that the PE firm gets to sell the starup to someone else who pays "a lot too much" money?
> to obtain management status and get first pickings
What does that mean? A PE firm having management status? I'm thinking individual people have management status does it mean that the PE firm appoints some of its own people as managers / CEX:es?
I think typically not. That scheme is referred to as a "pump and dump" (buy a position in a company, greatly exaggerate it's value, then sell while the price is high, although you typically would do it with shares, not actual ownership of the company). I would imagine the people that play in this space could see the blood in the water. Plus the firms that do it are rather notorious, you'd want to do some serious thinking before paying them anywhere close to full price for an asset.
I'm not an expert, but from what I've gathered, they typically buy these companies, saddle them with as much debt as they can (which they then funnel into other ventures), liquidate anything worth selling (intellectual property, manufacturing facilities, etc), and then let the company crash into bankruptcy because it was already failing, and now it has tons of debt and nothing of value.
> What does that mean? A PE firm having management status? I'm thinking individual people have management status does it mean that the PE firm appoints some of its own people as managers / CEX:es?
It means they own the company; the PE firm is effectively the board of directors. I don't know what portion of the C-suite they typically replace. My offhand guess would be the CEO and CFO at the very least, to keep a tight hand on the purse strings. At this point, I doubt the rest of the C-suite matters much, because they plan on running the company into the ground. You probably don't have a ton of use for a CIO or COO in a company you don't expect to exist in a year (although I could very well be wrong).
The individual people with management status are also largely irrelevant. The plan is to leverage the corporate structure for profit, not the corporation itself. All the profit they want to extract comes from high level plays like selling IP and shuffling debt around; mid-level managers are basically just there to make sure that the company hobbles along long enough for the firm to extract maximal profits, which isn't very long.
Hopefully that's close to the truth; it's what I've picked up from other HN threads. I'm not a finance person so I don't know/understand the exact instruments used. Also, fair warning, since I'm basically just parroting information I've gotten from HN that I don't feel like I really understand, I've probably picked up whatever biases for/against PE firms were in those threads. It doesn't sound particularly vicious to me, which makes me think that either I don't fully understand the picture either, or that HN just really doesn't like PE firms (maybe for killing off what they saw as viable startups?).
Nearly 10 M€ worth of assets of CEO and his parents have been frozen as a precautionary measure.
(Finnish:) https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/jattimainen-takavarikko-...
It's more of a question of how many seconds it would take for it to happen.
Let the police investigation find out.