People had repeated conversations that went, effectively, "Are we going to pay royalties?" "No, we are going to spend money on something else."
I don't know who was in a position to have that conversation and make that call. But it didn't just happen in a corporate verb-with-no-subject sort of way.
and this I'm afraid is why, until whatever happened is actually laid out clearly, nobody who was in a senior position at Unbound during the 'let's spend the royalties' period gets the benefit of the doubt.
it's like when you see headlines about road traffic accidents and they say 'a car hit a cyclist'. No, the person driving the car hit the cyclist. The car was under their control.
I agree with this, and I also am somewhat dismayed that it’s Archna Sharma’s face on all the press covering this, when she seems to be the one trying to clean up the mess, and wasn’t even at the company when it made such reckless decisions.
I have emailed The Bookseller about this. Maybe others could too. It’s deeply unfair. (And not a good look to have a woman of colour be the face of a company where these decisions were mostly being made by white men.)
I find it Quite Interesting how John Mitchinson, who was publisher/director at Unbound through the period where high-up people were deciding to spend royalties on something else, is not the face regularly attached to this story.
Resigning now won't help if it was fraudulent rather than careless.
English law is pragmatic, not actually being a director doesn't shield you if you were acting as a director and resigning after actions still means you are responsible for them and their consequences. Practically for about 2 years.
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I don't know who was in a position to have that conversation and make that call. But it didn't just happen in a corporate verb-with-no-subject sort of way.
English law is pragmatic, not actually being a director doesn't shield you if you were acting as a director and resigning after actions still means you are responsible for them and their consequences. Practically for about 2 years.