Sign here: US Corporations had until yesterday afternoon to sign off company accounts
under new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Hoping to restore
investor confidence, senior executives pulled out their Montblancs and scribbled
signatures on statements for the SEC.
Together with tough new penalties, this may constrain some corporate wrongdoing, says the Economist. However,
we need 'eternal vigilance':
'The ends of bull markets regularly produce waves of corporate scandals,
followed by periods of clean-ups. Some of the rule changes in those earlier
episodes seem to have had an effect, others have been dead letters. And when
markets begin to roar again, and there seem to be myriad opportunities for making
money fast, clever people find new ways to bend or evade rules, no matter how
carefully they have been crafted, and to mislead stampeding investors.'
[Economist].
Beggaring belief: Fortune magazine lists the 'greed' merchants,
the top US tech executives who became 'immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely
wealthy' by selling stock at inflated prices while investors were being
told to buy.
The top three: between January 1999 and May 2002, executives at Qwest
Communications made $2.26 billion through selling company stock; executives at Broadcom made $2.08 billion; executives at AOL Time Warner made $1.79 billion.
'Executives and directors of the 1,035 corporations that met our criteria
took out, by our estimate, roughly $66 billion. Of that amount, a total haul
of $23 billion went to 466 insiders at the 25 corporations where the executives
cashed out the most.' [Fortune].
