After speaking to Dr. David Gill's MBA Global Executive Program class on Saturday, I was thinking of the last time I faced the breaking point where the lack of ethics clashed with an extremely high indignity factor.
Last year, the company received an unsolicited investment/purchase inquiry from a large MFI in Central America. I quickly caught a plane down from San Francisco to explore the offer. I had Orbelina meet me as 2 heads are always better than one when doing a deal.
The President of the potential investor company/buyer was very charismatic and had done quite a few deals with smaller entities. However, his knowledge of finance was scant at best which clashed with my left brain financial training. He wanted to do the deal based on the force of his personality. Once we set the talking points, we agreed to meet the following month in Honduras.
I flew down to Honduras the next month. After touring our operations, the offer was made. Orbelina and I instantly realized that the deal was not feasible as the financing was not first rate, too much leverage involved, and the investment was to build brick and mortar instead of increasing the loan portfolio to help more budding entrepreneurs.
When I reminded him that the offer did not follow the talking points that we had set the prior month he flew into a rage. His response was that I being of Chinese background, I did not speak sufficient Spanish to understand the deal. He ranted on for another half hour while his General Manager actually put his head on the conference table and tried to escape the embarrassment of the tirade by covering his face with both hands. Our Loan Supervisor drove them to the airport an hour later and reported that the two fought the whole way. Apparently, this tirade wasn't the first.
He then tried to get around me by trying to do the deal with another person in our company. Needless to say, I let that offer die out ASAP. A year later, he has come back asking to try to do the deal again with a better offer. I turned the whole affair over to Orbelina who isn't thrilled about it.
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