Whopping Backdating Settlement Reached

Former UnitedHealth Group CEO and chairman William McGuire has agreed to pay $30 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over options-dating issues. McGuire also agreed to cancel options to purchase 3.675 million shares of stock, according to The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (C...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 10, 2008

Apple Settles Backdating Case

Apple Inc. and several of its officers and directors, including two CFOs, agreed to settle their stock-options backdating case for $14 million, The National Law Journal reported.In a deal that won a federal judge’s preliminary approval on Monday, Apple also agreed to pay $7.3 million in attorney ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 10, 2008

$7.2 Billion Approved for Enron Shareholders

A Federal judge has approved the distribution of $7.2 billion in settlements to former Enron shareholders who lost money when the one-time energy giant went bankrupt almost seven years ago, the Houston Chronicle reported. U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon also approved the payment of $688 milli...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 9, 2008

Norwegians Added Rio Tinto to Blacklist

A Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has banned Rio Tinto from its portfolio because the mining company reportedly is not environmentally responsible.Norway’s Ministry of Finance said its government pension fund cannot invest in the international mining group because its Grasberg mine in Indonesia —...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 9, 2008

A Leaky Pool

IT IS a simple but brilliant idea. Pooling risks—the essence of insurance—allows people and businesses to protect themselves from disaster. The insured have the incentive to buy homes or build business, knowing that they will be saved from the worst outcome. That enables the economy to grow faste...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 8, 2008

Ex-CFO Settles Self-Dealing Fraud Charges

The former president and CFO of a Dallas health-product marketing company, along with another one-time executive, settled Securities and Exchange Commission civil charges that they engaged in a fraud arising from undisclosed related-party transactions.Mark D. Woodburn, former president, director ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 4, 2008

Accountant’s Theft Excuse? “Deep Middle Age” Depression

A Melbourne, Australia, accountant, guilty of stealing nearly $810,000 from a client of 10 years, told the judge through his lawyer that the thefts were the actions of a man in “deep middle age” and suffering from depression.Lance Robert Scholes, chairman and managing partner of accounting firm H...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 4, 2008

Green Buildings: A Slow, Steady Blip

The greening of commercial real estate is no longer an arcane issue. Witness the practical evidence: Green building construction is predicted to increase to $60 billion by 2010, at which time 10 percent of new commercial construction is expected to be green, according to the McGraw-Hill Construct...

By Marie Leone • Sept. 4, 2008

The Counterintuitive Commercial Real Estate Market

Unexpectedly, the current downward drift in commercial real estate prices isn’t translating directly into cheaper rents for corporations. Faced with the sudden uptick in inflation, landlords are finding ways to collect more money from lessees.To be sure, the Moody’s/REAL Commercial Property Index...

By Marie Leone • Sept. 4, 2008

Belgian Waffle

What a difference a couple of weeks make. When Gilbert Mittler, then finance chief of Fortis, spoke with CFO Europe in June, his views on the Dutch-Belgian bank’s strategy were clear and confident. It would be “substantially less exciting,” he said, if he had to manage only the subprime crisis or...

By Tim Burke • Sept. 3, 2008

Jailed CA Ex-Chief Kumar Points at Others

Former CA chairman Sanjay Kumar, from the prison cell where he is serving a 12-year term for his role in a massive accounting fraud scandal, pointed the finger at one-time boss and friend Charles Wang. Kumar alleged that Wang, cofounder of the company previously known as Computer Associates “pers...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 3, 2008

Gulf in Opinion

As they shopped an impending IPO to investors this summer, Hartmut Mehdorn and Diethelm Sack, CEO and CFO of state-owned German railway group Deutsche Bahn, made headlines by visiting the offices of sovereign wealth funds in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They’re not the only executives adding the Gulf to ...

By Jason Karaian • Sept. 3, 2008

Kozlowski, Swartz Seek End to Jail Terms

Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz, the erstwhile chief executive officer and CFO, respectively, of Tyco International, are still trying to end their prison terms.Arguing that they were wrongly convicted at a flawed trial, the imprisoned former executives of the conglomerate went before New York’s ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 2, 2008

Alpharma Reaches for a Pill

Specialty drug-maker Alpharma Inc. — faced with an unsolicited $1.4 billion takeover bid from King Pharmaceuticals Inc. — adopted a shareholder rights plan designed to thwart the offer that the target called “inadequate and not in the best interests of Alpharma shareholders.”The decision to imple...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 2, 2008

Death by Committee?

Sir Barnett Cocks, a clerk in the UK’s House of Commons, once provided this cynical definition of a committee: “a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”As two high-profile advisory groups — the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Improvements to ...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 1, 2008

Expense Management: Better Ways to Buy

At the height of the dot-com boom, in January 2000, the term “E-procurement” appeared in these pages for the first time. Virtually synonymous, then, with E-commerce, the term joined a burgeoning pantheon of Internet buzzwords and promised a revolution in how companies bought and sold everything f...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Sept. 1, 2008

Blame Game: A Jury Tackles CFO-CEO Fraud

How does a jury react when a company’s ex-CEO and ex-CFO both face civil accounting-fraud charges, and the panel must decide who’s liable: one of them, both, or neither?Such a jury deliberation — similar to those in the cases of Enron, Worldcom, HealthSouth, Tyco, and others — played out in a muc...

By Roy Harris • Aug. 29, 2008

Companies Get Protected from DoJ Pressure

The U.S. Department of Justice revised elements of a controversial internal policy governing federal investigation and prosecution of corporate crimes. The revision — making it illegal for the government to demand certain privileged information from companies — comes in response to criticism of ...

By Kate Plourd • Aug. 28, 2008

Con-way Settles SEC Foreign-payoff Charges

Freight-shipping company Con-way Inc. agreed to pay $300,000 to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that improper payments made by a unit to numerous government officials violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.Emery Transnational, a Philippines-based firm controlled by the San F...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 28, 2008

SEC Eases Filing Rules for Non-U.S. Firms

On a busy day in which it also drew a roadmap for moving to international financial reporting standards, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to simplify disclosure requirements for foreign companies offering securities in the U.S.Under the amendments — designed to make it easier for U....

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 27, 2008

A Broadcom Apology, while Ex-CFO Waits

Broadcom Corp. cofounder Henry Samueli, scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 8 on a felony count of lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission, apologized to the judge in a two-page written statement.Fellow cofounder Henry T. Nicholas III and former Broadcom CFO William Ruehle, meanwhile, are sti...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 26, 2008

Biden’s CFO Contributors Are a Tiny Group

Long-time Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden has had a relatively small following among political contributors who are CFOs — especially compared to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, who recently chose him as his running mate.Since the 2004 presidential election, a mere 11 fi...

By Kate Plourd • Aug. 26, 2008

In Quest for Answers, CFO Is Put on Leave

The chairman and CEO of Quest Resource Corp. and two related energy companies resigned after the discovery of questionable transfers of $10 million in company funds to an entity controlled by the CEO. At the same time, the CFO was placed on administrative leave while an investigation is conducted...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 25, 2008

Sarbox Stays: PCAOB Judged Constitutional

A federal appeals court decided Friday that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that created it, are constitutional. The ruling denies a claim that the existence of the PCAOB violates the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle.The decision by the U.S. ...

By Alan Rappeport • Aug. 22, 2008

Hayes Lemmerz Ex-CFO Loses Civil Fraud Case

Correction:This story has been updated to reflect that the jury ruled in favor of ex-CEO Ranko Cucuz, and against the Securities and Exchange Commission, on three of four counts. A previous version of this article, and its headline, said only that the CEO, along with the CFO, had lost the case. C...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 21, 2008