Businesses 'bury bad news'

Published on Monday 13 October 2008 10:19

THREE quarters of business people think companies are reluctant to expose the full extent of the financial downturn they are facing, new research has found.

A survey by the Aziz Corporation also found that 88 per cent think that businesses would be more likely to recover confidence if they disclosed bad news early and in full.

But four in five business people said they have little or no experience of how to cope with an economic downturn because the ecomomy has been booming for so long.

Professor Khalid Aziz, chairman of The Aziz Corporation, said: "It is perhaps not a matter of chance that the recently-humbled HBoS had the youngest management team in the banking sector, with its youthful chief executive having never been through a recession in banking."