PERSPECTIVE: Propriety not loyalty could sway clients if IPG falls foul of SEC.(recent activities of Interpublic Group)(Editorial)

It has been a busy week for Interpublic Group. Just when the very bottom of the trough seemed to have been scraped away and the only way was surely up, IPG managed another slump.

The last whimper of the Bozell name as IPG rolls it into Lowe New York is, perhaps, the least dramatic of the recent events. A merger driven by economic urgency rather than strategic fit, Bozell was nevertheless an anomaly within IPG - a standalone office cut adrift from a network after the rest of its agencies were merged into FCB at the end of the 90s. So this is one bit of housekeeping that IPG has been forced to get on top of.

Now rumours of senior executives' computers being snatched by financial investigators suggest the company's accounting drama, or at least the gossips' version of it, is hotting up. And while the Securities and Exchange Commission last month upgraded its investigation into IPG from informal to formal, JP Morgan this week downgraded its IPG rating from neutral to underweight. The 7 per cent fall in IPG shares that followed showed this was more than just a comment on the ad market.

In the middle of all of this, IPG is negotiating furiously with its banks to amend its credit agreements. As stock-market watchers know, the company has notched up dollars 2.9 billion in debt and the SEC is investigating dollars 181 million in overstated revenues, mainly driven out of McCann-Erickson in Europe.

Not ...