Who knew that movie stars and filmmakers needed a CFO to be the grown-up in the room?

Jason Cherubini did, and he’s built a successful career out of producing, conceptualizing, and financing dozens of movies.

Cherubini is the co-founder and CFO of Dawn’s Light Media, a film production company with offices in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. He is also a lecturer of accounting and finance at Stevenson University and runs a finance consultancy.

CFO Brew spoke to Cherubini about the tradeoffs between finance and creativity, and why filmmaking is a bad business.

There’s a popular misconception of CFOs being CF-nos. How do you reconcile the tensions between an artist’s vision and your need to be financially prudent and responsible?

I actually love the term CF-no. I think that’s a great attitude to go in with. Actually, we found most of the people we work with, especially the directors we’ve worked with more than once, it’s a give and take. We as a company and me as the CFO have a fiduciary duty; we have an obligation to bring this in on budget.

The budget is set because that’s what will give us a return when we go to sell it. Especially for a lot of our directors or the higher-level decision makers who are going to really push their creative vision, it’s all about giving them an idea of where their budget is going.

Keep reading.–DA

The SEC settled fraud charges with Maryland-based biotech company Osiris Therapeutics Inc.’s former CFO Phillip Jacoby earlier this month.

The SEC charged Osiris and four former executives with “prioritizing revenue growth over lawful accounting and misleading investors in the process” in 2017. According to the SEC, the company routinely overstated its performance and issued fraudulent financial statements for a two-year period.

Jacoby, according to an SEC release, caused the company to file “fictitious and premature revenue and [provide] false information to Osiris’s auditors.” According to the 2017 charges, the SEC alleges that Jacoby, along with other Osiris executives, made “false and misleading statements and omissions about the manner in which Osiris was recognizing revenue, including statements about its accounting for key contracts and relationships and its treatment of consignment inventory.”

Jacoby, as part of the settlement, will be unable to serve as an officer or director of a public company and will be responsible for reimbursing $45,000 of the $223,965.88 in Osiris stock sale profits that he was held liable for. Jacoby had previously pleaded guilty to lying to auditors, but avoided a prison sentence.

The long-running case has taken many twists and turns. Osiris paid a $1.5 million penalty in 2017 to settle SEC charges, as reported by the Baltimore Sun. Gregory Law, a former Osiris CFO, was dismissed from the case in September 2019. Osiris’s former CEO, Lode Debrabandere, was dismissed from the case in November 2022.—LR

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 18%. That’s the percentage of the EU’s crude oil imports that’s currently supplied by the US, which displaced Russia as the bloc’s biggest supplier, as of December. (CNN Business)

Quote: “Emergency rescue lending is a very risky business. If you bail out borrowers that are in default or teetering on the edge of default, the challenge is knowing whether your borrower faces a short-term liquidity problem or a long-term solvency problem.”—Bradley Parks, co-author of a report on China’s $240 billion bailout of nations buckling under debts related to the country’s belt and road initiative (the Guardian)

Read: As more white-collar workers experiment with ChatGPT, many are beginning to wonder if AI could replace them. (the New York Times)

Stay the course: According to 600 CFOs, building organizational resilience is the top priority. Learn how to achieve it—and how to balance cutting costs while investing in growth—in Coupa’s latest survey, available here.*

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Understanding the benefits of risk management can help you anticipate problems before they materialize so you can protect the interests of your company and its employees.

Join CFO Brew and Audible Chief Financial and Growth Officer Cynthia Chu on March 30 in a free virtual event sponsored by Oracle Netsuite to discuss how finance departments can evaluate critical decisions when things aren’t so certain.

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