Losses for the year ending 31 March 2010 ballooned to £4.3m as a result of a £2.6m adjustment for items that had not been properly accounted for in the preceding two years.

Among the reasons cited for HH's accounting miscalculations were cut-off errors, where sales were allocated to the wrong month – a practice that was apparently particularly common in the group's continental European operations.

As one observer pointed out, this smacks somewhat of a typical ruse by sales staff to maximise bonuses, which makes one wonder what sort of checks – if any – the company had in place to verify the information it was receiving from its network of subsidiaries (active in 17 countries around the world).

To add insult to injury, HH's suppliers are being squeezed as a result of the mess it has found itself in, with payment terms being pushed out from 60 to 90 days to help cashflow and to cut net debt by around £2.8m.

In the directors' report, the company claimed that, "in mitigation, the HH ethos was derived from one of fast growth and highly motivated staff that believed in looking forward, but with poor financial control on a global scale", which brings to mind the immortal line penned by Alexander Pope in his 1709 poem An Essay On Criticism, "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".

Now the management of HH certainly are not fools; however, the company's aggressive overseas growth strategy is looking over-ambitious at best – if not foolish – in light of the lack of adequate financial controls. This has now, we are told, been rectified – leading to a dramatic upgrade in HH's credit risk score – while the group has also divested low-margin print-broking HH Denmark.

However, the news served as yet another reminder of one of the problems that is seemingly endemic in the print industry – the irresistible lure of turnover growth at all costs. History teaches us that this never ends well and, while the HH ethos may have been all about "looking forward", one hopes that it will have learnt from its past mistakes.