Bookkeeper Gets Shockingly Long Prison Term

A former bookkeeper for a Florida accounting firm was sentenced to 15 years in prison after admitting to stealing more than $600,000 from a client, The Palm Beach Post reported.Glenda Mancil tearfully told Judge Dwight Geiger she was addicted to taking up to $20,000 at a time and was afraid her b...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 14, 2007

School’s Out Forever

The chief financial officer of a Georgia university abruptly retired amid a state probe into the possible misuse of a state credit card. James Brignati, vice president for business and finance at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, allegedly charged thousands of dollars for plane ti...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 13, 2007

Shareholders Win Huge Settlement from Sprint

A Kansas state judge gave final approval to a $57.5 million settlement over Sprint Nextel’s combination of its tracking stocks three years ago, the Associated Press reported. “It is one of the largest payments on record in a lawsuit stemming from breach of fiduciary duty,” said law firm Grant &a...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 13, 2007

Ex-CFO Admits Faking SEC Filings

A former CFO of United Rentals pleaded guilty to making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and could get up to 10 years in prison and a $22 million fine. The ex-executive, Michael Nolan, also must pay restitution of about $11 million. Despite his guilty plea in the criminal...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 13, 2007

Beazer Investors Get Their Say on Disclosure

A union activist investor has won the right to push for more disclosure by Beazer Homes USA. The Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that the embattled homebuilder must include in its 2008 proxy materials a shareholder resolution submitted by the Laborers’ International Union of North Americ...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 12, 2007

SEC: More Disclosure on Loan Exposure

The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to urge financial services companies, including banks and insurance firms, to disclosure more information about their exposure to potentially problematic loans in light of the massive number of gargantuan write-offs caused by the sub-prime lending cri...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 11, 2007

SEC Eyes Revision for Outdated Energy Rules

The Securities and Exchange Commission is responding to demands to update its disclosure rules for oil and gas companies. In a first step toward enabling such companies to disclose their reserves more accurately, the SEC will issue a concept release to formally gauge interest and collect advice o...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 11, 2007

Other People’s Money

Investors often cheer when companies buy back their own shares, and sometimes it sends an even more bullish signal when directors dip into their own pockets to purchase company stock.Investec Private Bank hopes to make it easier for CFOs to buy their own companies’ shares. Two years ago, the Angl...

By Eila Rana • Dec. 10, 2007

Conrad Black Sentenced in Fraud Case

Conrad Black will be spending less time in prison than some experts had predicted. The one-time media mogul was ordered to serve 6.5 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve for stealing millions of dollars from a company he had controlledThe judge had said earlier in the sentencing pro...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 10, 2007

FBI-SEC Action Leads to Kickback Cases

Federal regulators, targeting five separate schemes that involved penny stocks and alleged kickbacks to a fictitious hedge fund, have criminally indicted six individuals and filed civil charges against 10 individuals or companies they controlled.The Securities and Exchange Commission said the sch...

By Roy Harris and Stephen Taub • Dec. 10, 2007

SEC Ends Probe of XM Satellite Radio

The Securities and Exchange Commission has finished its investigation of how XM Satellite Radio handles subscriber data, stock options, and other matters and won’t pursue enforcement actions, according to the radio company. In September 2006, XM reported that the SEC launched an informal inquiry...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 10, 2007

CFO Points Finger at Ex-Employer

A former finance chief for Apollo Group testified that the company kept secret a seemingly damaging report about its pay policy, Bloomberg reported. Kenda Gonzales, who in November 2006 resigned as CFO of the company best known for owning the for-profit University of Phoenix, told a jury in a se...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 7, 2007

Hedge Fund Favors Flushing Poison Pill

A prominent hedge fund is calling on PeopleSupport Inc. to rescind its poison pill or amend it in a way that would allow more potential acquirers to make a bid for the company. IPVG Corp. and AO Capital Partners last week made an unsolicited bid to acquire PeopleSupport in an all-cash transactio...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 6, 2007

The $468 Million Clawback

William McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group, has agreed to pay a whopping $600 million to settle claims with federal regulators and his former employer over the company’s illegal backdating of stock options.Under Section 304 — the “clawback” provision — of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, McGuir...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 6, 2007

The Risks of Not Being Green

Pressure from institutional investors and state governments has compelled corporations in recent years to beef up their efforts to curb carbon emissions and fulfill disclosure requirements to share their environmental risks in their financial reports.Now, the heat is rising even faster. As deman...

By Sarah Johnson • Dec. 6, 2007

Backdating Bites Another HR Exec

A second former executive at Brocade Communications Systems was found guilty in a case involving the backdating of stock-option grants to employees.Stephanie Jensen, who was the company’s vice president of human resources, was convicted following a two-week jury trial on one count of conspiracy a...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 6, 2007

Legal Separation for Insider-Trading Couple

A former Morgan Stanley finance executive and her husband were each sentenced to 18 months in prison for trading on insider information relating to acquisitions of three publicly traded companies. Jennifer Wang, a former Morgan Stanley finance department executive, and her husband, Rubin Chen, a...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 5, 2007

Ex-Maxim CFO Won’t Settle

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Maxim Integrated Products and its former CEO and CFO with reporting false financial information to investors by improperly backdating stock-option grants. The company as well as ex-CEO John Gifford agreed to settle the charges, but the former CF...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 5, 2007

Dell to Repurchase $10 Billion of Stock

Dell is moving forward with a massive, $10 billion buyback of its common stock, equal to nearly 20 percent of its market capitalization.The personal computer giant, which recently became current with its regulatory filings, told shareholders at its annual meeting that it will resume repurchasing...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 4, 2007

Icahn Gets His from Temple-Inland

Two subsidiaries of Temple-Inland Inc. have obtained $2.14 billion in financing from a group of lenders affiliated with Citibank.The company said it will use the proceeds to pay a special dividend of $10.25 per share, or about $1.1 billion; reduce debt by $700 million, which includes its recently...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 4, 2007

Shareholders Gang Up on FormFactor

Shareholders are suing FormFactor Inc. for allegedly failing to disclose and misrepresenting material adverse facts.The class-action lawsuit, at least the second of its kind filed against FormFactor in the past few weeks, stems from the company’s announcement in late October that it would be unab...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 4, 2007

Restating Your Case

Restatements have become an increasingly common fact of life for finance departments, with 1 out of every 10 U.S. public companies restating their financials in 2006. They’ve become so widespread, in fact, that some of the stigma may be fading, according to a recent study by the Public Company Ac...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 1, 2007

Sustainability Reporting: Earth in the Balance Sheet

Three weeks before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to sound the alarm on climate change, a coalition of investors, state governments, and environmental groups was sounding an alarm of its own. It petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission to require publicly traded compan...

By Scott Leibs • Dec. 1, 2007

A Tale of Six Cities

When Erik Prusch joined Borland Software Corp. last year, his top priority was making the company profitable after two years of losses. Critical to achieving that goal was the relocation of company headquarters from Silicon Valley to “Silicon Hill,” otherwise known as Austin, Texas, where the com...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 1, 2007

Loyalty Programs Prepare for Takeoff

Are frequent fliers about to fly solo? Airline loyalty programs may soon become stand-alone businesses as struggling carriers consider unlocking the growth potential of these highly profitable units. “Separating the frequent-flier plan from the airline could drive short-term appreciation in airli...

By Avital Louria Hahn • Dec. 1, 2007