It’s about time. - No kidding.
Subsequently, she agreed to plead guilty to a charge the judge called "questionable," and testified against Ruehle in a way the judge said seemed "scripted." She awaits sentencing, although her case may be affected by Tuesday's events. The judge said the government also pressured former Broadcom general counsel David Dull to testify in a way that favored the prosecution. Carney saved some of his harshest criticism for Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Stolper, the lead prosecutor in the case, saying at one point, "The lead prosecutor somehow forgot that truth is never negotiable." .....
"I'm sure there are going to be many people who are going to be critical of my decision . . . and argue that I'm being too hard on the government," the judge said. "I strongly disagree. I have a solemn obligation to hold the government to the Constitution. I'm doing nothing more and nothing less." Tuesday's court action was the latest in a series of setbacks for federal cases alleging the misdating of stock options. McAfee Inc.'s former general counsel, Kent Roberts, was acquitted last year in one such case. In August, an appeals court threw out the conviction of Brocade Communications' former CEO, Gregory Reyes, ruling prosecutors made improper statements to the jury. In reviewing the case, the judge singled out the way the government handled two witnesses. He said Nancy Tullos, a former Broadcom vice president of human resources who refused to cooperate in the investigation, was fired from a new job after a prosecutor called her employer and disclosed allegations against her.
This shows how bad this case (and, likely, many similar ones) really was : Carney's decision to dismiss Nicholas' options case was unusual because it came during Ruehle's trial, with no motion by Nicholas pending and was accompanied by the decision to dismiss the SEC lawsuit. .....
Yet they consistently kept "missing" Bernie Madoff, who was right under their noses all the time, but who was really a good ol' boy, who was one of them.
Broadcom ruling shifts scrutiny - LAT, 2009 December 17, by Stuart Pfeifer and E. Scott Reckard: The Broadcom cases, among others, illustrate the struggles the U.S. attorney's office has encountered in prosecuting corporate executives for backdating stock options, a practice that makes it appear that their companies had fewer expenses and greater income than they really had. ..... Nathan J. Hochman, a former assistant attorney general, said prosecutors are always looking for the "most provable lies." But those are hard to find in options backdating cases ..... By February 2007, the FBI reported that it had 61 active options backdating investigations, and the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking at more than 100 companies for possible civil enforcement actions. The prosecutions that followed the FBI investigations grew to include executives at some major corporations. In addition to Irvine chip designer Broadcom, cases were brought against Brocade Communications Systems Inc. of San Jose, Comverse Technologies Inc. in New York and builder KB Home in Westwood. Then the cases began to fall apart. Last year, the former general counsel for computer security company McAfee Inc. was acquitted of options-backdating charges. Prosecutors won a conviction in the case of former Brocade Chief Executive Gregory Reyes -- only to see the conviction overturned on appeal. ..... On Tuesday, Carney dismissed backdating charges against Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III and the company's former chief financial officer, William J. Ruehle, accusing federal prosecutors of intimidating witnesses and preventing the defendants from receiving a fair trial. He also said he had significant questions about the strength of the evidence presented during two months of testimony in Ruehle's trial. One problem has been the murky accounting rules for stock options. Companies can legally backdate options, as long as the practice is accounted for as an expense in regulatory filings. In 2007, Broadcom added $2.2 billion in options-related expenses it had failed to disclose in previous years. More than 200 other companies also have restated options expenses. "The accounting standards and guidelines were not clear, and there was considerable debate in the high-tech industry as to the proper accounting treatment for stock option grants," the judge said. "Indeed, Apple and Microsoft were engaging in the exact same practices as those of Broadcom." ..... The stunning dismissals of criminal cases against three former Broadcom Corp. executives in the last week focused on what the judge called "shameful" misconduct by prosecutors. But at the core, he had something more telling to say: Prosecutors couldn't prove the defendants did anything wrong.