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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brokers Are in Auction-rate Cross-hairs

Some regulators appear to be shifting the focus in their investigations of abuses in the auction-rate securities market, concentrating more on brokerages that sold the securities, and less on the banks that created them.On-site inspections of about 40 brokerages involved in the ARS market will be...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 21, 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

How a CFO Stole from Children’s Hospital

In connection with a scheme that the prosecutor described as “the lowest of the low,” the former chief financial officer of Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis pleaded guilty to defrauding the institution of more than $828,000,Robert Steven Brodzin’s plea was to one felony count of mail f...

By Stephen Taub and Roy Harris • Aug. 21, 2008

Harvey Pitt Returns to Government

Former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt has been invited once again to be securities sheriff. This time, his work will be on the state level, and will involve only one investigation. On Tuesday, Pitt was appointed deputy attorney general for the state of Alabama to investi...

By Sarah Johnson • Aug. 20, 2008

“Nobody Gets a Pass” in SEC ARS Probe

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into auction-rate securities abuses is ranging far beyond the five banks that have already agreed to buy back billions of dollars of ARS from customers, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox told reporters.“We have over a dozen pending investigations ...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 19, 2008

SEC Halts “Pump and Dump” Scheme

The Securities and Exchange Commission has once again demonstrated that its regulatory tentacles reach well beyond U.S. borders.The regulator has obtained an emergency court order freezing the profits from an alleged $13 million international fraud involving a Seattle-area microcap company and a ...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 15, 2008