City comment: Hamish Champ, city editor
The turbulent wake of the London & Edinburgh Swallow Group (L&ES) debacle prompts a serious question. Why do business people deal with individuals whom they suspect of being, how should one put it, 'slippery so-and-so's'?
Almost everyone I've spoken to who supplied Alan Bowes' company admit to having had some concerns about his operation. But still they ploughed gamely on, and now, as administrators attempt to salvage people's livelihoods - or make a complete pig's ear of things, depending on your point of view - they understandably have qualms about having taken the course they did.
So why deal with the man in the first place? The answer, it seems, is straightforward. As one former L&ES supplier put it to me last week, businesses, particularly small ones, are always chasing targets and to do so they often take risks. They go for the opportunity to be in on the 'ground floor' with a company that might be heading for big things and in whose success they might share. Any nagging doubts are squirreled away, and only if the company comes a cropper does one regret any commercial involvement with them.
My observer added sanguinely that with something like L&ES it is easy to be wise after the event. This is as true for journalists - even cynical ones - as it is for business types.
When I met Bowes earlier this year he brushed away detailed questions about his business model. Suspicion is one thing, evidence something else. If we, all of us, had had the evidence back then that we have now, perhaps the L&ES situation might have turned out differently.
It's of small comfort to those now counting the cost, but for anyone else it might be worth reminding oneself of the old adage: "If it seems too good to be true then it probably is."
