Fred SGP

For those of you that don't know me, my name is Fred Fournier and I am part owner of SGP Racing. I was hoping that this would be kept off the forums, but since Kyle felt the need to express his side of the story, we have no choice but to respond. My association with SGP began in 1996 as a customer and later as an investor and part owner. Mark started the company in 1992, and met Kyle as a customer some years later. As with many small companies there came a time when they were in a cash bind, and they approached me with the offer of 20% ownership if I would invest. I felt good about the business, and trusted Mark and Kyle, so I accepted the offer. The shop is not my full time job, but I try and be there as much as I can. My full time job is a pilot for Continental Airlines which takes me out of the country an average of four days a week. Therefore, my involvement in the day to day operation of the company is limited, but I trusted them. Things eventually evolved to where Mark was overseeing the shop and mechanics, with me working in the shop on the days I was home, and Kyle running the office. Over the past three years business had grown tremendously, however money was always tight. Mark became suspicious and started to look into how Kyle was handling things. What he discovered was not good. Kyle had been mixing both personal and company expenditures on his personal credit cards, and making all payments to his cards out of company funds. He had also been paying many personal expenditures directly out of company funds using the company bank card. Many have been quite extravagant. Two and three hundred dollar dinners, thousands of dollars in Internet wine orders, car payments, house payments, Internet site membership fees not having anything to do with cars, vet bills, and the list goes on. All paid directly out of company funds. This has been going on for over two years and needless to say, it has been a mess trying to sort it out. Although Kyle did charge a lot of company expenditures on his credit cards, he kept no accounting of them, and felt justified in having the company pay for his personal expenditures as repayment. I will not go into the amounts, but things did not balance out. Not even close. It does not take an MBA to know that that is no way to run a company, not to mention the legal aspects of it. There is much more to this. Cash transactions that were never recorded, part orders paid by the company but unaccounted for, promises made to customers (many of which you will hear from soon) that were never for-filled which we are now having to honor, etc. This list also goes on and on. When Mark first brought this situation to my attention, I wanted to give Kyle the benefit of the doubt. But after seeing the evidence it was obvious this situation was at best gross criminal mismanagement of company funds. This post was long in coming, but we wanted to be sure of the facts first. I'm sure Mark will post more later if he feels the need. Thank you for your attention.