Patisserie Holdings: who dropped the cake?

It was a winding up order that started it, presented to The Gazette on a quiet September’s day, where it sat for a month like a ticking time bomb. Not even the board of the company in question knew a countdown had started.

This was not Act One of the Patisserie Holdings (LON:CAKE) fraud saga. Nobody knows how deep the rot goes, apart from the perpetrators. The fictitious accounts that propped this fraud up like a house of cards could even pre-date the May 2014 initial public offering. No-one has yet indicated otherwise.

The gig’s up. A few bad actors have dented a lot of people’s wallets. When good investors fail, they learn and move on - after all, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Patisserie Holdings has been dishing out quite a lot of experience, recently.

It’s a curious feeling, revisiting the group’s half-year update from 2018, less than five months before that announcement in October. Can any of the figures be trusted or was it all a desperate work of fiction? I’m squinting at the screen, looking for hints of what was to come.

Surely, the diligent investor can’t be so easily...