Posted on 09/27/2006 2:25:15 PM PDT by HAL9000
From the House Committee on Energy and Commerce website -
Schedule - Hewlett-Packard’s Pretexting Scandal
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Thursday, September 28, 2006
2123 Rayburn House Office Building
10:00 AM ET
Webcast available
Available now in PDF format -
I guess Congress has a hearing on just about anything except how Clinton failed to protect the U.S. in the 1990s.
The solution, IMO; Don't let Boards vote with shares that are not explicitly given to them.
During the Compaq merger, the BOD held a large portion of the outstanding proxies by default...in other words, if you did not tell them how to vote, they got to vote for you.
This is the equivalent of letting incumbent politicians vote for all of the registered voters who do not show up to the polls.
If BODs had to sell their plans to stockholders with the knowledge that INTERESTED stockholders could actually direct the decisions, things would be much different.
I think there should be a HUGE class action suit on this issue. When the BOD of a publically traded company engages in identity theft (they call it pretexting), they should be held accountable. I don't want to see billions paid out, but I would like to see rule changes that prevent BODs from ever getting so much power again.
The first panel's testimony ended quickly. Nine witnesses took the fifth.
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