The Aspen Technology, Inc. board of directors today fired company CEO David McQuillin and announced that it will need to restate recent financial statements.
It’s been nothing but bad news from AspenTech (AZPNE) lately, which in the last 12 months has been the subject of a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation, has been threatened with delisting by NASDAQ, has been the target of shareholder lawsuits, and has been forced to divest considerable portions of its product line.
The AspenTech board of director’s audit committee has identified five transactions entered into during fiscal years 2000 and 2001 that it has determined were accounted for improperly. The smallest of these transactions involved recorded revenue of approximately $800,000 and the largest involved approximately $4.3 million of recorded revenue. It has further concluded that, as a result of these transactions, reported revenue for the fiscal years 2000 and 2001 was overstated and that reported revenue for the fiscal years 2002, 2003 and 2004 was understated. Therefore, revenue and earnings recorded in the financial statements for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2000 through June 30, 2004 will be restated. As a result, previously issued financial statements and any related auditor’s reports for those periods should not be relied upon.
The committee said it does not currently believe that the restatements above will materially impact the final reported results for the first quarter of fiscal year ending June 30, 2005, which ended September 30, 2004. But the audit committee also intends to continue researching transactions going as far back as 2000, and is reserving the right to amend existing findings as the audit continues.
Because of the review, AspenTech did not file Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Last month AspenTech finished settling antitrust concerns by selling to Honeywell International the business and intellectual property of the HyproTech line it acquired when it purchased Canadian firm HyproTech Ltd. Earlier this year it sold the AXSYS line of plant design software to Bentley Systems, also to satisfy antitrust concerns.
AspenTech stock closed today $5.57, down $.22; it lost 38 cents on Tuesday. The stock has traded as high as $12.52 in the last 12 months. AspenTech clients include Aventis, Bayer, BASF, BP, ChevronTexaco, Dow Chemical, DuPont, ExxonMobil, Fluor, GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, and Total.