Lets just suppose that for the last five years or so, you have been making money like mad....
You hide as much of it as you can, and you still announce a billion dollar profit while claiming that you are a 'legacy" carrier and retrenching staff as fast as you can,,,,because you are a poor and simple legacy carrier.....
So poor you.... competing against Government supported carriers, state run airlines, down on your luck, being thumped by competitors....and you have to retrench staff and hire foriegners to do their work...because nothing less is sustainable.....And you still stuff money into the hollow logs and make a billion profit, while crying poor to your staff.
So eventually the hollow logs are full to bursting. You are still crying poor to your staff and replacing them with foriegn labour because "business is so bad". The situation is so 'bad" that you cannot hide any more profits, so your story about needing to retrench staff and replace them with foriegn labor is going to sound a little thin. So what do you do?
Well, you can't go to the market and explain that instead of making 1 billion profit, the figure is closer to two billion, so you need to retrench more staff can you?
The obvious thing is to go private isn't it? Then you can empty the hollow logs without anybody watching can't you? You can still claim to be a poor little legacy airline while retrenching staff can't you? Nobody can see your accounts if you are private can they? The hollow logs can be emptied in secret.
The fact is that there are no auditors in Australia that can even understand what or where the "hollow logs" are. I used to regularly play with the Auditors sensibilities, ten minutes in the cockpit of a 767 would do nicely. I discussed the matter with a former seriously senior financial person from an competitor airlline today, and his view paralleled mine......... the deal is not in the interests of shareholders, but that is only my opinion, and everything about the bid is assuredly legal......