Word: worldcom
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Move over, Martha. As the troubled phone company now known as MCI prepares to emerge from the brink, its erstwhile commander, Bernard Ebbers, may be headed for the pen. Ebbers is the folksy former Mississippi high school basketball coach who hatched WorldCom in 1983 and, through a series of audacious takeovers, built it into the second largest U.S. long-distance operator. But his single-minded pursuit of growth and, in the end, his manic desperation to please Wall Street led him to mastermind, according to his federal criminal indictment last week, an accounting fraud estimated by some experts...
...selling her ImClone shares when she did.) No one embodies late 1990s speculation more than Ebbers, 62, who as CEO of a high-flying telecom operated at the epicenter of the tech bubble. Ebbers grew unimaginably rich on paper by securing millions of stock options. When WorldCom's growth machine began to sputter so did its stock price, denting Ebbers' net wealth. Yet he tapped WorldCom's cash reserves for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to buy even more stock plus a huge ranch in British Columbia, a Georgia yacht builder and a minor league hockey team...
Billy Johnson of Altamonte Springs, Fla., is convinced that one of the tens of thousands of new jobs in India should be his. Johnson, 41, was a programmer for WorldCom when the company imploded in the wake of a massive accounting scandal. After six months of looking for a programming job, Johnson realized that the work he knows is exactly what outsourcing companies do best. "I spent $5,000 of my own money to become an Oracle [enterprise software] developer," he says. "Nobody's hiring Oracle developers." For a while, he believed it was just the economy. A lifelong Republican...
...arrested, and he is confined in a Milan jail while Italian prosecutors, joined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, probe his role in an alleged $8.8 billion fraud that could implicate Parmalat in Europe's biggest corporate scandal ever, easily on a par with those of Enron and WorldCom in the U.S. Parmalat has filed for bankruptcy, and corporate-turnaround expert Enrico Bondi is trying to salvage what he can of the firm, which has 36,000 employees in 30 countries, including 7,300 in North America. Among its holdings is Archway Cookies, now on the block. Along with...
...billion and may turn out to be far larger. Seven other executives were arrested last week, and Tanzi's son Stefano was questioned by prosecutors. The size of the alleged fraud could make Parmalat the biggest corporate scandal ever in Europe, easily on a par with Enron or WorldCom in the U.S. Parmalat filed for bankruptcy on Christmas Eve, and corporate-turnaround expert Enrico Bondi is trying to salvage what he can of the firm, which has 36,000 employees in 30 countries and top-selling brands including Parmalat uht milk and Archway cookies. On Friday, dozens of company workers...