Re: $11Bn --> $3Bn. How do you not see *some* of that "value" was bogus?
If they were "cooking the books" to meet all their expectations, then the stock price didn't suffer a hit for not meeting them. Since HP had to presumably purchase x million shares to acquire the company, having a fraudulently inflated share price means that they overpaid due to fraud. There is a multiplier affect going on. Say the stock price is 40/share too high and HP had to purchase 70M shares to acquire it. That would result in an overpayment of 2.8B. These are just sample numbers, but you can see how it could get out of hand quite easily due to the multiplying affect.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
