February 6, 2024
If you have stock in a company, take a good look at its annual report. There may be a clue in there which should tell you if it’s a shell company engaged in shady dealings.
Moody’s Analytics reports that it found 2,200 companies that listed a director “aged 123 years and above, despite the fact that the oldest known human lived to 122.” One even listed a director as being 942 years old (nearly topping the 969-year mark of Biblical patriarch Methuselah), while thousands of companies claimed to have directors under the age of five.
There were other, uh, irregularities that might suggest that these companies were not completely on the up and up: a China-based textile and clothing manufacturer reported over $2 billion in revenue in 2019, despite having only one employee, and roughly 22,000 entities had a registered address at the Egyptian pyramids.