Is anyone surprised about Corporate Travel?
The thesis that CTM's margins never made sense has been borne out.
So it turns out that Corporate Travel Management has been stealing from its clients in the United Kingdom, including His Majesty’s government, to the tune of £78 million ($157 million), and the company says there may be more where that came from.
As usual, Corporate Travel’s story is evolving. Initially, in August, it claimed that its new auditor Deloitte had merely identified issues around the timing of revenue recognition over multiple years, which would result in restating prior year profits higher and posting a lower 2025 profit. “Any restatement,” it assured shareholders, “is expected to be non-cash in nature.”
What has still not been explained, and I suspect will never be, since no explanation will be credible, is how Corporate Travel’s board of directors could go from being satisfied that the company was engaged in some level of inappropriate but victimless earnings smoothing to being the perpetrator of a large-scale theft.
