Word: worldcom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Business education has also produced former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and other MBAs behind the malfeasances of Tyco, HealthSouth, Haliburton, AIG, and WorldCom. Many executives of corporate America who hold MBAs have also been engaged in the unethical acts of raiding their corporate treasuries at the expense of employees and stockholders. Emulating President Bush’s hubris, a multitude of CEOs in corporate America give themselves obscenely large bonuses that have little to do with their performance. In 1980, the CEOs of Fortune 500 large corporations received, on average, 70 times larger annual compensations than their average employees. Under...
...decades, Wall Street prized corporate leaders who could dip into their financial black box and deliver steady, no-surprise earnings, even if investors had no idea precisely how those magic numbers were reached. That changed after dazzling bookkeeping (later found to be fraud) at Enron and WorldCom led to the destruction of billions of dollars of wealth. In today's regulatory climate, uncanny consistency invites scrutiny...
...folks fleeced by Ebbers & Co., the penalties brought a measure of satisfaction. WorldCom's 2002 bankruptcy wiped out stock worth $180 billion at its peak. Employees like Bryant who had much of their retirement savings in company stock saw their investments wiped out. Bryant's stake dwindled from $39,000 to $4,000. (It's scant solace that WorldCom emerged from bankruptcy under the less tainted name of MCI, now a takeover target likely to fetch upwards of $8 billion from Qwest or Verizon.) WorldCom bond investors had a second reason to cheer when J.P. Morgan Chase agreed last week...
...question now is whether another WorldCom-like debacle could occur despite the safeguards enacted in its wake. No doubt, corporate boards are flexing more muscle in an effort to improve accountability of all sorts. Former Boeing chief Harry Stonecipher recently lost his job for having an affair with a company employee. Disney's Michael Eisner and Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina lost their posts for poor performance, and AIG directors just forced out the firm's longtime chief, Maurice (Hank) Greenberg (see "Another Titan Takes a Tumble," above), as the company's legal woes mounted. WorldCom's collapse hit directors...
...indeed, the product that took down Greenberg is legal and still used by others. "Accounting rules have an enormous amount of subjectivity," says analyst J. Paul Newsome at brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. "What nobody had an issue with 15 years ago is very much not O.K. post-Enron, post-WorldCom...