Word: frauds
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...board that the company had been playing dirty with its accounting practices. She knew as she said it what would happen. Within days, the company fired its famed chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, and told the world that it had inflated its profits by $3.8 billion--the largest accounting fraud in history. The number has since grown to $9 billion, and counting. Her colleagues have been placed in handcuffs and led past TV cameras. Shareholders have lost some $3 billion since the news broke, and soon at least 17,000 WorldCom employees will have lost their jobs. In December...
...become the public face of the WorldCom audit. But in early July reporters showed up at her home and her parents' place in Clinton. Republican Congressman Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had released her audit memos to the press, declaring, "This is Fraud 101." A WorldCom representative phoned her and said, "The press is calling, and they want to make you a hero." Cooper could not stomach the attention. "I'm not a hero. I'm just doing my job," she said. "There was nothing to celebrate," she remembers...
...August, Sullivan was indicted on charges of securities fraud. He faces up to 65 years in prison. The California public-employees' retirement system--the largest state pension fund in the country--is suing to regain some of the $580 million it lost in the WorldCom debacle...
When WorldCom first owned up to its massive accounting fraud last summer, most observers of the once soaring telecom upstart figured its calls were numbered. Rivals like AT&T and Sprint were happy to close the book on a company they blame as the principal culprit in the telecom bubble--one that had posted curiously high profits that they could never quite seem to match. But six months after its dirty little secret of success was exposed and the company was left for dead, WorldCom is confounding both its critics and its competition--not only refusing to die but showing...
What the public would perhaps most like to see is Enron's top executives do some jail time. So far, only one of them, former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, is facing criminal charges, for conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering (he denies wrongdoing). Ex-chairman Ken Lay is expected to be charged with insider trading before long. But lengthy prison sentences for white-collar crimes are rare...