Nortel Executives Found Not Guilty On Fraud Charges 151
Following up on the earlier story about Nortel execs waiting for a ruling in their corporate fraud case, new submitter Unknown1337 writes "Something doesn't add up when a multi-billion dollar corporation loses it's value so quickly, but the courts have decided it wasn't intentional fraud by the executives that caused it."
Re:Malice (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do not attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I don't know that someone triggering a $12.8 million bonus payout for themselves can be adequately explained by stupidity. I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
...accused of participating in a book-cooking scheme designed to trigger $12.8 million in bonuses and stocks for themselves at the once powerful Canadian technology giant.
Two Tier Justice system (Score:5, Insightful)
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
Even if not guilty, they lose (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those cases where the defendant can't possibly win.
If guilty: they dishonestly re-jigged a companies accounts so as to pay themselves a massive bonus. Fraudsters of the highest order.
If not guilty: Not the point. They were in charge of Nortel. If they (totally innocently) re-jigged the accounts thinking it would do the company good, gave themselves a massive bonus as a big pat on the back and then found the company collapsing around their ears, they're still responsible. Only instead of being fraudsters, they're dangerously incompetent.
Where was the coercive plea bargain offer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Download academic articles? Go to prison and be tortured for decades.
Falsify records, ruin a company for your own personal enrichment, and defraud hundreds of thousands of shareholders along the way? No fucking problem.
America is winning a worldwide race to the bottom.
Re:In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Fig (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet,
so many people who were 'against' the occupy movement and everyone still believes in trickle down economics.
Really if you think about it. Trickle up makes a lot more sense.
Why should millionaires who get another few million really spend any of it? Just add it to the pile.
I think Michael Moore did it best, he went into the Wall street buildings and tried to make some citizens arrests. That's what should've happened en mass.
Wealth (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Two Tier Justice system (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately we don't live in a Communist system. Remember how in the former Soviet Block the members of the Intelligentsia used to commit crimes with total impunity while the common people had to obey the law and dissidents were convicted based on bogus accusations?
I'm so happy we live in Western Capitalist Democracy where none of those things happen.
Re:In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Fig (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet,
so many people who were 'against' the occupy movement and everyone still believes in trickle down economics. Really if you think about it. Trickle up makes a lot more sense.
If you succeed in destroying someone's deeply entrenched beliefs using facts and logic, that person won't change his mind but will hate your guts forever.
Re:Malice (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
GW Bush comes to mind.
Re:Malice (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
GW Bush comes to mind.
Seriously, you still believe this propoganda? His staff has flat out admitted they intentionally tried to make him look dumb and "Country-boyish" to appeal to his core constiuency. The guy graduated from one of the best schools in the country, lead the entire quite well (allthough you may disagree with the direction) and won 2 terms to office in what's considered to be 2 of the toughest elections in modern history. The boy ain't dumb, he was just fake'n.
What's worse (Score:4, Insightful)
What's worse is this is one of those cases where the corporation dipped into or underfunded the pension plan, so when they went under they took all their past and current employees with them.
Just imagine how you might feel having worked your whole life, retire on a fixed pension, then hear about these execs that get 12million bonus OVER their salary, and stock, to tank the company (perhaps illegally cooking books in process), which btw ends up reducing your pension income by 33% or whatever.
I'm just suprised these sort of jerks (Nortel isn't the only one) arn't beaten to death by walkers and canes from cheated pensioners.
Re:Nortel: victim of industrial espionage? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree that Brian Shields' claims do not add up. As a fellow former Nortel employee employed at the time, it was not Huawei the execs were concerned with. The groups they were most concerned with were Cisco and Lucent. I had never heard them even mention the name of Huawei at the time (~2001 when the biggest decline started). The timeline doesn't even make sense. Supposedly, the hacking started in 2000, but the big downturn (and massive layoffs) hit throughout 2001 (in seemingly endless waves). That would have given Huawei a year to steal the tech, make sense of what they'd stolen, started fabricating cloned hardware and software, and convince buyers that their equipment was worth buying versus the incumbents in order to make a sufficient dent in Nortel's sales. At this point the telecoms generally were willing to pay a premium for known reliability in order to meet their 5 9's, there is no way in the span of one year a sufficient number of orders would have transitioned from Nortel to Huawei since the buyers would not have been convinced to go with this upstart in any significant way. Now it is possible that in the latter years (2004+) the Huawei effect was significant enough to prevent a comeback (although I doubt it; they Nortel was already too far gone), but there is virtually no way it played a significant role in the downfall.
The problem was simply that Nortel, Lucent, Cisco, and others were all in a massive game of chicken trying to expand faster than their competitors by gobbling up all the talent they could get and get products on the market as quickly as possible to claim ownership of the massive demand from the telecom bubble. When the bubble popped, there was simply no way for all the major players to survive in their newly bloated states. What was amusing is that when the downturn occurred, Nortel threw away (sold off or spun off) their older, but still highly profitable products (telephone handsets and older phone switch systems) in an effort to focus on the newer product lines that were hoped to be the future, but which few actually bought. This was silly since the stable profits from the older tech gave Nortel a significant and stable base in which to invest in the newer products and innovate. By getting rid of the older products, they slit their own throats.
Re:Malice (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna do this real fast, so with any luck, we can all put this to bed once and for all. George isn't the worst human being alive. He isn't bright. He's not retarded either. He is a criminal, involved in criminal conspiracies (the majority of evidence points to Dick Cheney as the primary perpetrator in most cases, but George was right there in the thick of it.) George ignored critical warnings on National Security leading directly to 9/11, instead George was setting the record for the longest summer vacation by a President in History, while Dick Cheney and the Bush Cabinet were desperately trying to revive the Star Wars Program from the 80s so Dick could funnel billions of dollars into Halliburton. George was involved in multiple national deceptions leading to a completely pointless and disastrous war in Iraq. He gutted the Bill of Rights, burned down the Geneva Convention, and sequestered innocent Americans to far off countries to be tortured to no particular value for National Security. He knew precisely what Catrina would do to New Orleans (he was in an emergency National Security Council meeting going over the projected impacts of the storm shortly before storm fall.) He let the disaster in New Orleans happen without aid or intervention. To this day, there is no reliable count of the number of people that died in the flood. What is available is that tens of thousands of poor people lost their homes forever and that wealthy property speculators have made billions of dollars snapping up their property at pennies on the dollar. This my friends was a cynical land grab, foisted on the backs of the poor who the government saw as a problem, and this was their solution. The property values of the 7th ward are now dramatically up. I could go on ad nauseum, but it should be absolutely clear that this administration was little more than a criminal syndicate and that we had 8 years of corporate hit men running our nation. The fact the George might or might not be an imbecile seems frankly unimportant in the face of the damage he did. I don't care if he's stupid, I do care that he broke my country, obstructed justice, destroyed two cities, and crashed the economy not once, but twice. George W. Bush is the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. We will pay for his disasters for at least another generation. Personally I hope he's a genius so he can fully appreciate what a toxic flow of human sewage he and his entire administration were. Oh, and for those who need references, ping me, I have about 4,000, The most amazing thing was that his crimes are so well documented and like the Bankers on Wall Steet, instead of sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff, they walk the streets, free men.