Page 25 - How Not To Cook The Books Article

The Gem

At the heart of this tale is the gemstone, the Gem of Tanzania.

After Ernst & Young found that Wrekin’s “ruby” could in fact be a lump of
rock possibly worth £100 it decided to auction it to Wrekin’s creditors.

The Tanzanian Gem was found to be worth so little that leading London
auction houses refused to put it up for sale, and instead the
administrators Ernst & Young tried to sell the stone through the

November issue of RocknGem Magazine and Colored Stone Magazine
in the US - publications read largely by mineral collectors and lovers of
New Age crystals.

Eventually it was auctioned off to Wrekins creditors where it was sold for
£8,100. The purchaser was Tim Watts, a Midlands entrepreneur, who

bought the stone for £8,100.

“I am not an emotional man,” he says. “But I must admit,
when I first saw it I was wowed. It is the size of a football. I
got a jeweller friend of mine to look at it and he instantly
spotted around 20, beautiful deep red rubies on the surface.
Now, they are going to be worth a considerable amount of

money,” (11)

When Tim Watts, the head of Pertemps (which controls Network Group
Holdings whose Network Construction Services in Telford were owed
several hundred thousand pounds by Wrekin), a £500m-turnover
recruitment business, looked down the administrator’s list of assets he
commented that:

“There were all sorts of things on it, but I didn’t want a JCB. Where
on earth would I have put one of those? But I saw the gem and
recognised it would have notoriety value and could help plug the
hole left by Wrekin. I thought it would be worth at least £10,000 so
an £8,000 bid seemed about right. Even if we made £2,000 it
would be worth it. I added an extra £100 in case anyone else had

the same idea.” (11)