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ICSTI: news items
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: news items
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 09:38:35 +0100
- Organization: IUCr
------------------------------------------- Subject: Pieter Bolman joins STM as Chief Exec. STM publishing continues to change quickly, and over the last two years the Executive Board of STM has determined that our trade association must change as well. The importance of enabling technologies and of innovative collaborations such as CrossRef, HINARI, and AGORA continue to grow in importance. At the same time, the increasing interest around the world in the creation and dissemination of STM information has stretched our resources for advocacy and education more than ever. We have begun a substantial upgrade of our resources for outreach, collaboration, advocacy, and education with the creation of the post of Chief Executive Officer of STM. STM?s Executive Board is pleased to announce that Dr. Pieter S.H. Bolman has accepted a one-year appointment to the new position of Chief Executive Officer of STM effective 1 August. Dr. Bolman will provide the full-time strategic leadership of STM that the current fast-paced and challenging environment requires. Dr. Bolman joins us from Reed-Elsevier, where he has been Vice President and Director, STM Relations since 2001 before which he was CEO of Academic Press for 10 years. Pieter?s long and distinguished publishing career began in 1972 at North Holland Press, which he joined as a physics editor from the laboratory bench. He was Managing Director of Pergamon Press prior to joining Harcourt to run Academic Press. Lex Lefebvre continues as Secretary General reporting to Dr. Bolman. In January 2005 Lex will take up a new appointment as Managing Director of the International Publishers Readers? Organization, a Dutch RRO closely affiliated with STM. Lex thus continues in his valuable role as part of the STM family, and he and Pieter as a team will greatly strengthen our organization. Please join Lex and the Executive Board in welcoming Pieter to STM. ------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Swets in trouble... With thanks to STM for the information translated from het Financieele Dagblad of last Monday. Swets at brink of ruin after accounting fault Banks demand capital injection GERBEN VAN DER MAREL AMSTERDAM ? Swets & Zeitlinger, Dutch distributors of scientific information, are in trouble. The business needs refinancing after it was found that it made losses in the past years. As a consequence of the problems Swets no longer meets the credit conditions of the bank. On Friday, shareholders will decide on a capital injection of € 45 million. This is confirmed by Jan-Willem Baud, chairman of the board of supervisory directors. Baud is the director of NPM Capital, which holds 26% of the shares of Swets. Other shareholders are the Swets family (29%) , Nesbic (23%), Paribas (15%), and Alpinvest (7%). The business has approx. 1400 employees in 23 offices. NPM has promised new money. Baud: ?We believe that Swets can go on for another hundred years in spite of the problems.? Other shareholders are still hesitant about whether or not they should jump to the rescue, says Baud. Already in May it became public that Swets had found ?errors? in their books. And that hundreds of jobs will be scrapped. Just last year Swets was still being offered for sale to international high-risk venture capitalists with a price tag of hundreds of millions. One buyer, Candover, pulled out in the last minute. Swets is an intermediary between scientific publishers and major users such as universities. The company suffers from the increasing distribution of information through the Internet. Attempts to become more electronically active themselves have not panned out as predicted by the management. The last figures published by Swets pertain to 2002, when ? according to the information ? a turnover of € 1.2 billion and a net profit of € 30.8 million were achieved. Swets now has to review the figures over 2001, 2002, and 2003. According to Baud, transactions between parent companies and subsidiaries were processed incorrectly for years. Swets presently cannot give insight into the adjusted results. As a consequence of debit transfers, which Baud does not want to specify, Swets ends up in the red. ?But non-recurring items do not get us into loss. Profits do have to increase though.? Fraud, says Baud, was not discovered. Finance director Eelco de Boer is said to have stumbled across errors of his predecessor after taking up office last year. Whether these events will have consequences for director Eric van Amerongen or other managers, Baud does not want to disclose ahead of the shareholders? meeting next Friday. ------------------------------------------------------- -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more details _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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