Talk:Dany Bahar/Archives/2015

Article rewrite

Hi – I've put together a userspace draft that addresses the multiple issues flagged here and is intended as a replacement for this version. It is properly sourced, well structured and neutrally worded. I have a COI in that I work for Bell Pottinger and Dany Bahar is my client. I have made this clear on my user page and on COIN. If someone could take a look and post here or on my talk page that would be great. Many thanks. HOgilvy (talk) 01:12, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

That reads like advertising. Compare the BBC's capsule bio.[1], or the one from Business Week[2].

If you want to improve the article, here are a few things you can do to get started.

• Provide a photo, by taking one and uploading it to Wikipedia. That you can do even with a COI. Simple headshots are preferred.
• Provide solid citations for educational background. What schools, what degrees, year of graduation. Reliable sources per WP:RS are necessary.
• Mr. Bahar is not listed in the history of the International Roller Sports Association. [3] A cite for that is needed.

John Nagle (talk) 18:50, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

John Nagle, you misunderstand me – I'm well aware of this existing article on Dany Bahar, but it's clearly lacking in quality, uses peacock terms (needs of the client paramount, fresh outlook, reignited, etc.), lacks relevant details of his various roles, is poorly referenced and its neutrality is disputed. The tag suggests a rewrite may be needed, hence I've rewritten it. If you think the tone of my draft isn't neutral, please indicate where and why and I will amend it for you to take another look. Given the peacock terms of this article I think the draft compares favourably. Many thanks. HOgilvy (talk) 10:17, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

OK, removed some of the peacocking. Left the part about switching Ferrari from an engineering focus to a customer-satisfaction focus. Compare Bob_Lutz_(businessman) of GM, who did did something similar there. In general, replacing an entire article, especially from a COI position, is discouraged on Wikipedia. Are there any factual errors that need to be fixed? John Nagle (talk) 20:28, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi John Nagle,

Happy New Year and I'm sorry to have taken a while to reply. There aren't any errors exactly but there are widely reported details about various aspects of his career that are missing and the Lotus section is not up-to-date – Mr Bahar filed a claim against Lotus in 2012 and an out-of-court settlement was reached last year.

I’ve gone through my draft again and removed anything that could be construed as promotional, but COI or not I have to say I’m struggling to see what’s promotional about it or how it could be seen as inferior to what's here. Let me outline the ways in which I think it’s an improvement:

1. Clearer structure

2. Better sources: In expanding this article I have not relied on poor sources. The only good quality mainstream media sources the current version uses are the BBC and the New York Times. While my draft also has some of the lower-tier outlets referenced in the current article, as well as some others, it also includes:

• BBC articles (x3)
• New York Times
• Sunday Times
• Bilanz – a prominent Swiss publication
• Bloomberg
• Wall Street Journal
• Telegraph
• Financial Times

As well as the Daily Mail and Top Gear Magazine.

3. More in-depth:

• Schooling: Name of school in Switzerland
• Inline skating and roller sports: Named the presidents he supported
• Red Bull: Entry into Formula One, COO position, New York MetroStars rebrand
• Ferrari: New global brand department, expanded number of retail stores
• Lotus: Context and strategy of five-year plan (unprofitable for 15 years, move from low-margin model to compete with big marques, targeting China & emerging markets); Lotus Renault GP F1 team; showroom in Beijing; Proton’s new owners (DRB-Hicom); brought the account of his dismissal up to date (widely reported claim against Lotus, out-of-court settlement last year) – the current article leaves the Lotus story unresolved and simply quotes a statement from 2012, even using the present tense (‘reads’)
• ARES: Perhaps this is what you think reads like advertising – it’s hard to see another way of going into a little more detail than your sentence does about what this company actually does, the designers working there and the specific models it adapts.

4. More encyclopaedic: I’d argue my draft is actually more encyclopaedic – peacock terms and business language are still a problem in the current version:

• ‘…fresh outlook…’
• ‘…wider, younger audience…’
• ‘…reignited…’
• ‘…global reach…’

I wonder if my COI might have prompted you to be a little hasty in dismissing content that is actually a lot better than what’s currently there. I’d therefore be really grateful if you could revisit and reconsider my draft. If you’re still unhappy with the idea of a move then let’s work towards a way of incorporating what’s good about each version into an improved article, as something clearly needs to be done to address the multiple issues listed in the tag. Thanks very much. HOgilvy (talk) 15:39, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I have reviewed the draft and found it to be of sufficient quality to be worth my time. I did some trimming and copyediting to remove promotional or editorialized language. I also checked a few sources randomly, especially in areas where a COI editor often uses a source that is about the company, but does not actually mention the article-subject, and found that the sources did in fact support the article-text and were about the article-subject. I also found that the quality and sourcing of this editor's contributions have improved since last time I saw their work into an imperfect, but definitely above-average grade, especially in the COI-realm of quality comparisons; COI is discouraged because it tends to be junk, but we should encourage an editor such as this that is doing good work in-spite of it, in the rare incidences where that occures.

I only have two questions: (a) What did the audit find out about Dany that resulted in him being fired? and (b) What were the terms of the out-of-court settlement? If you can answer those two questions, using quoted text from a source to answer them, I'd be happy to make a couple tweaks and move your draft into article-space. Of course that may result in drama, but sometimes it's hard to get anything done around here without it. I can also just mozy on somewhere else if you prefer to avoid it. CorporateM (Talk) 22:51, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi CorporateM, thanks for looking at this. In answer to your questions:

a) There was never any official reason given for his dismissal in June 2012, but the allegations that were rife at the time were of misuse of company funds (the “improper or unauthorised spending” referred to in the statement from the GT Spirit article, ref 13 in the current version). While it’s probably true that he could have been more frugal while he was at Lotus he never acted without board approval or outside the limits of his authority, which is why he filed for wrongful dismissal.

b) The settlement was contingent on the terms not being disclosed – details of Dany's claim (see below) were reported, but all that was announced as far as the actual settlement goes was that the two sides had agreed to withdraw their claims against each other.

The sequence of events was:

• May 2012: DRB announced that he had been "temporarily suspended from his role, to facilitate an investigation into a complaint about his conduct" as reported in the Telegraph.

• June 2012: Group Lotus announced that he’d been dismissed following the results of DRB’s investigation; this doesn’t actually seem to have been reported by mainstream media at the time but was widely covered in trade media and various automotive blogs and outlets – this from Car Magazine is probably the most comprehensive as it includes the Lotus statement of 7 June:

Group Lotus plc (“Lotus” or the “Company”) can today confirm that, Mr Dany Bahar has been terminated from his employment as Chief Executive Officer of Lotus with immediate effect.

The decision was made by the Board of Group Lotus plc following the results of an investigation into a complaint made against him by the company’s penultimate holding company, DRB-HICOM Berhad.

That article also mentions that Car Magazine tried to contact Lotus but that they “refused to be drawn on the reasons for Bahar’s exit”.

• August 2012: Dany filed a £6.7m law suit against Lotus and DRB for unfair dismissal (Telegraph), DRB said it would vigorously oppose the claim but was still circumspect about the reasons for his dismissal:

“Dany Bahar was dismissed after an investigation into his stewardship of Lotus,” DRB said in the statement. “We believe we have acted properly at all times.”

• October 2012: Lotus filed a counterclaim against Dany that sought to recoup roughly £2.5m for “unauthorized expenses and overpaid salary and bonuses”. This Bloomberg article from November 2012 covers it, and includes the statement from Proton (the parent company DRB had bought) that’s also quoted piecemeal in the 2012 GT Spirit article:

The Proton board felt Bahar had “done an ‘abysmal’ job as CEO, was excessively extravagant and mercenary and was preoccupied with his own interests,” according to the Lotus counterclaim. His expenses “were all the more unacceptable given that his brief was to turn the business around, which he singularly failed to do.”

So that was part of the Lotus counterclaim but still not an official reason for his dismissal.

• May 2014: It was reported that Dany had settled his claim for unfair dismissal a month before the case was due to be heard in the High Court in London. This from the Telegraph is the best source. DRB’s statement was:

“DRB-Hicom wishes to announce that the parties involved in the legal suit have signed a Settlement Agreement and Release…and have agreed to withdraw their claims against each other.”

No details of the settlement were reported as he had to sign a confidentiality agreement (that's original research, it wasn’t reported), but it was reported (BBC) that he had claimed that the terms of his contract, which had been renewed for a further period up to September 2015, entitled him to 5% of Lotus’s value in the event of a sale, and that Lotus had fired him ahead of the sale to DRB to get round this clause.

That’s the sequence of events as reported. At the time all the media were reporting that the word on the street was it was to do with expenses, but that was never officially announced. There are a couple more sources (albeit a bit of tittle-tattle, especially the second one from Jalopnik) that might shed a bit more light on it:

• This Is Money (2 June 2012): The Mail reporting that “friends” of Dany insisted that “all expenditure was specifically written into his contract”, that he “had permission to use helicopters and jets because this was the way that business was done in the supercharged world of Formula 1”, and that he also had permission “to approve expenditure up to £5million and to do up his rented house for about £35,000.”

• Jalopnik (16 July 2012): ‘The Real Reason Lotus Fired CEO Dany Bahar Isn't The One They Gave’

Officially, Lotus fired CEO Dany Bahar because he misused funds and not because he was a disaster in almost every way. Unofficially, we're hearing that Lotus Cars advisory board member "Maximum" Bob Lutz is telling people the opposite in private.

Rumor has it that Lutz is actually telling people the company was looking for any excuse to get Bahar out of his contract. The fact that the CEO had apparently been using company funds to renovate his personal properties and to pay for private aircraft at a time when the company was struggling seemed to fit the bill nicely so that's what they went with.

That also links to a further article on Jalopnik criticising his performance at Lotus.

So while the mainstream coverage and the official statements that came out might not provide definitive answers to either of your questions, this is the order of events and these are, to my knowledge, the best sources for that sequence of events. In reality, it’s likely that the new owners didn’t like him and what he stood for, didn’t like the people he’d brought on board, didn’t approve of his five-year plan (which he’d kicked off with an unprecedented unveiling of five new models at the 2010 Paris Motorshow), and thought his expenses were profligate at a time when the company was struggling. There’s plenty of criticism along these lines in the various blogs of what he did at Lotus – it’s a big marque, his strategy was fairly radical and it arouses strong feelings – but there are also one or two who have defended him, like Steve Cropley for Autocar (‘I don't think former Lotus chief Dany Bahar was a bad man’ – May 2014). He writes that he interviewed Dany several times and that they were in agreement that “there simply weren’t enough Elise-Exige buyers in the world to sustain the company”, i.e., that something had to change and change fast. HOgilvy (talk) 16:35, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

 Done. The above-text was too long, so I just checked out some of the sources and re-wrote some of it. The company also filed suit against Bahar for his alleged mis-spending, which is worth noting. The primary issue at-hand seems to be alleged extravagant spending, which the prior version did not seem to make clear. If you could add an infobox with a freely licensed image, that would be a great improvement as well. CorporateM (Talk) 17:11, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi CorporateM, yes I mentioned Lotus’s suit, that was the counterclaim (October) in response to Dany’s suit for wrongful dismissal – Dany's came first as the Bloomberg article makes clear (it’s the only source I’ve found that does make that clear). Also it was never actually reported that this was what the investigation found – Proton made the statement about expenses in relation to Lotus’s counterclaim.

Would you consider this perhaps:

In June 2012, shortly after Proton had been acquired by Malaysian firm DRB-Hicom, an internal investigation by the new owners led to Bahar’s dismissal from his role as CEO amid allegations that he was misusing company funds for extravagant expenses. That August, he sued DRB-Hicom and Lotus for £6.7m for wrongful dismissal, claiming Lotus had dismissed him to avoid paying the five percent of the company's value he was owed in the event of an acquisition. Lotus later sued Bahar for £2.5m in an effort it said was to recoup some of the money he had spent. An out-of-court settlement was reached in May 2014.

Noted re infobox and image, I can do both. Thanks. HOgilvy (talk) 17:30, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

That looks fine. Your comment is accurate that I rather made an assumption that the investigation must have found that the allegations are true, since it led to his being fired, but it didn't explicitly say that. The version above is better. Do you mind adding cites so that it is copy/pasteable? CorporateM (Talk) 20:45, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

CorporateM, no problem, I've added them above using the GT Spirit source plus Car Magazine, BBC Norfolk and the August 2012 and May 2014 Telegraph articles. Also left out the dollar value for the Lotus claim but your call. The Telegraph August 2012 and BBC Norfolk are used for the second time here so could probably do with a ref name in the article – happy to do that if you like along with an infobox and image. Thanks. HOgilvy (talk) 23:04, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

 Done CorporateM (Talk) 23:15, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, much appreciated. HOgilvy (talk) 23:17, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

@CorporateM: – just noticed it's semi-protected; will I be able to add an infobox and image with my number of edits (low, c. 200)? Also I noticed the first line of Early Career, "Dany Bahar 20" – I had 'Aged 20' there, guess just 'Dany Bahar began'? HOgilvy (talk) 23:29, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Ah, just read further on autoconfirmed, get it. Thanks. HOgilvy (talk) 23:40, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi again CorporateM, I've just noticed that it's not made clear that DRB-Hicom had recently bought Proton. I've suggested a tweak to the first sentence in the paragraph above and added a Bloomberg source – do you mind taking a quick look? Thanks very much. HOgilvy (talk) 10:49, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

There's an article in Jalopnik which says "Officially, Lotus fired CEO Dany Bahar because he misused funds and not because he was a disaster in almost every way. Unofficially, we're hearing that Lotus Cars advisory board member "Maximum" Bob Lutz is telling people the opposite in private."[4]. Is there a more reliable source for that? John Nagle (talk) 19:15, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi John Nagle, no there isn’t – I referred to that article in the discussion above along with another gossip article from This Is Money. They show that there were other views flying around at the time but they’re based on rumour and certainly that Jalopnik article is a poor source as you’ve implied. Also a thorough examination of the serious coverage shows that the reasons for his dismissal were never actually disclosed by Lotus, Proton or DRB. HOgilvy (talk) 12:01, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

RE the suggested tweak, is there a reliable source about him being fired that mentions the acquisition in that context? If so, I'll put it in, but I need a reliable source that establishes relevance between the two events. CorporateM (Talk) 16:54, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

CorporateM – this Telegraph source establishes it best: "The controversial chief executive was dismissed from the Norfolk-based company in June 2012 and filed a £6.7 million lawsuit against Lotus owners DRB-Hicom, claiming the sacking also left him out of pocket after DRB-Hicom bought Lotus parent Proton from the Malaysian government in 2012." I think the first sentence needs to mention that DRB had very recently bought the parent company Proton otherwise the reader's wondering who DRB are in the context of the subsequent litigation. There's no date for the acquisition in this source however – if we just said "shortly after" would that work? I've tweaked the above to that effect and added the new cite. HOgilvy (talk) 17:13, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

I did some copyediting to squeeze it in there without adding too much detail, but I would be resistant to doing much more. Currently there is 1 sentence for each side of the argument and if you add too much detail about information that's proving his point, than we have to add more detail from the other perspective. The end result is a big waste of time creating an undue issue and you leaving frustrated that every time you suggest edits to support his POV, we will naturally make edits from the opposite perspective. Of course you are free to do as you will, but my advice would be that it's good enough at this point and a good time to leave it be for the time being. CorporateM (Talk) 19:40, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I agree. Thanks for giving your time to this and for your initial comments above. HOgilvy (talk) 15:34, 24 January 2015 (UTC)