Mazars Group

Hello.

And completing our Friday panel, George Lagarias, Chief Economist at the consultancy Forvis Mazars.

Good morning.

Good morning.

If our reserves are used, we become vulnerable, which just shows the complexity of the situation.

Shall we talk about a different kind of energy now? Another thing that might be pushing up costs for people or is very, very likely to be Cornwall Insights today.

which is the consultancy that forecasts the energy price cap and does a pretty good job of it.

It's predicted that after the 4% increase that kicked in this week, we could see the price cap on energy bills for homes rise another 16% for the first quarter of next year.

I think investors can take a lot of comfort that we're held to a really high accounting and investment process and do a proper job.

Second of all, Mazars are independently valuing the portfolio on a quarterly basis, so we're not marking our own homework from a valuation perspective as well.

I think that we do apply... very standard project finance principles to the way we invest so ultimately all of our projects are special purpose companies that are established with a specific purpose to build own operate an asset so on day one there's no real credit there if you imagine just a shell company and you add the credit by saying, okay, I'm going to contract with this party to build the asset.

I'm going to contract with this party to operate and maintain it, this party to offtake the services from it.

She lives in St. Louis.

She works for Forbes, Mazars.

She's a CPA.

Very good.

Like, honestly, we might have to form like a super PAC and start buying out commercial space on Golf Channel and running, like, negative ads against these organizations.

Orvis/Mazars right now.

And, like-

This ad is paid for by Soly Solomon Inc. [laughs]

Lee Cantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one.

Today on the show, we have executive coach with Forvis Mazars, John Locke.

Welcome.

Hey, Lee.

Great to be here.

Well, I am so excited to learn about your coaching practice.

Tell us about Forbis Mazars.

How are you serving folks?

...

Energy Transfer, For- Forvis Mazars-

[laughs]

... and bearings.

And we've never really been told, and I wonder, is that satisfactory? So your predecessor goes to an Oireachtas committee and pleads the Fifth, cites legal advice.

There are two reports that I could see, Mazars and Cozy.

The FAI board look at them and say, "There could be criminal issues to investigate here.

Pass them onto the Gardai, the Office of Public Enforcement." Now, I've, I've checked those in- various investigations.

And so I thought, um, you know, champagne football, as good as the journalism is, that shouldn't be the official Irish public who've handed over 30 million.

Here's what happened.

So, uh, would it be worthwhile to publish the Mazars report? Would it be worthwhile to publish the Cozy report? Does the FAI not owe it to the public to come out and say, "The way we behaved in the Oireachtas was shameful.

Here is what happened.

Welcome to this episode of the Ghost Stories podcast.

I've got the team from Forvis Mazars back in the mix here, and someone we haven't spoken to before, which is always very exciting.

That is Yolandi Ferreira.

She is a partner at Forvis Mazars, and more importantly, certainly for the purposes of this podcast, she is also the head of Audit Africa, which is going to be a very interesting discussion because what we will be talking about on this podcast is that your auditor is actually a strategic business choice.

It's not just a compliance exercise.

It's the source of confidence in your business for your stakeholders.

You've given us lots to think about here.

Obviously, I'll make sure that people can easily reach you via LinkedIn through some links here in the show notes.

Some of the themes that are coming out, how are people feeling at those levels? What does it tell us about confidence in business in South Africa, confidence in business? The South Africa confidence in the global economy.

What are some of the big pressures? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges right now? And to help us make sense of things, we are joined by Sebastian de Pless, who is a partner over at Forvis Mazars South Africa.

And he's also a head of client and markets.

And it's going to give us a sense of what's going on.

Always good to talk to you, Sebastian.

Maybe where we can start for today is getting a sense around that C-suite barometer.

You guys are a, you know, traditionally we've known, you know, Mazars.

Now, for this, you know, Mazars as an audit firm.