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NEW YORK (AFX) - Ten former outside directors for the former WorldCom Inc have agreed in principle to pay 54 mln usd, including 18 mln out of their own pockets, to settle their portion of a class-action lawsuit brought by bondholders and shareholders in the wake of the firm's accounting scandal, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The remaining 36 mln usd will be paid by the directors' liability insurers, the sources were quoted as saying. Under the accord, the 18 mln usd to be paid by the former directors represents about 20 pct of...

enate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has led the attack in trying to tie Republicans to the corporate scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and elsewhere. He has harshly criticized U.S. companies that set up offshore shells in island tax havens like Bermuda to avoid U.S. taxes. But Daschle himself is now promoting just what he has criticized in quietly pushing a corporate-welfare scam that was too dirty even for Bill Clinton. The proposal would permanently exempt from taxation 90 percent of the profits earned by the subsidiaries of U.S. firms in Puerto Rico. The proposal would even allow U.S. companies to "borrow"...

Terrorism in the Middle East did not start with Islam. Political factions used terrorist tactics for centuries before the birth of Muhammad, and, in many ways, their actions foreshadowed the terrorist atrocities we see today. In particular, modern terrorists resemble the Sicarii, a particularly vicious group that plagued Jerusalem and Judea almost 2,000 years ago. The Sicarii (knifemen) thought of themselves as patriots, freedom fighters who would liberate Judea from the hated Romans. Jewish freedom was so important to them that they would do literally anything they thought might gain them that freedom, killing anyone that might stand in their...

As the presidential team meets in Waco to repristinate the face of capitalism, signs of difficulty at a cultural level are everywhere. The Wall Street Journal informs us that defense attorneys are having a difficult time finding jurors who are unaffected by the desire to damage any defendant with a corporate background. In one recent case, a poll was taken of 50 prospective jurors. They were asked to agree or not to the statement, "Corporate executives will lie to increase their profits." Over 50 percent agreed. It is suggested that what we might call Enron, Inc., has had an...

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 10 -- President Bush exploited the attacks of Sept. 11 for political advantage, sought to manipulate the markets to suit his ends and cannot combat corporate scandals because of his own business background, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe charged here today in a harsh opening to the November midterm elections. McAuliffe said that, after Sept. 11, Bush failed "to transcend partisanship" and squandered a mandate for bipartisan action by failing to lead on the economy, health care and the environment. "Step aside," he said to Bush, "because a Democratic Congress is coming in 2002 and...

It’s not front-page corporate scandals that will sink the Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. Their problem is not, as Al Gore believes, a new generation of special interests and power brokers who are trying to take advantage of the American people. If the Republican Party suffers this fall, the unexpected stock-market plunge will be why. For many decades, voters have associated the Republican Party with big business. Today, it’s just as popular—or unpopular—as it always has been. About 35% of voters approve of big business, and 65% approve of small business. Nothing has changed on this front. What has...

'Bowl'ing for Dollars Did a political deal cost the state millions? By Dan Levine Published 08/08/02 Erskine Bowles may regret the day he set foot in Connecticut. A national Democratic Party bigwig, Bowles served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton until 1998 and is now running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. From early 1999 until the end of 2001, Bowles worked as a partner at Forstmann Little, a New York-based leveraged buyout outfit. In the spring of 1999 Bowles came to Hartford for a "get-to-know-you" meeting with state treasurer Denise Nappier's staff. The firm already had a...

Hardly a radio or television news broadcast transpired on Wednesday without prominent mention of the handful of hecklers who attempted to disrupt Vice President Dick Cheney's speech to the Commonwealth Club of California with shouts of "Cheney is a corporate crook." The media's near blanket coverage of the anti-Cheney chanters comes despite the lack of a single witness alleging any corporate crookery whatsoever against the VP. The stunt alone, it seems, was newsworthy enough for most editors. The Clinton administration, of course, never had to worry about scandal driven heckling. It's not that protesters didn't show up regularly throughout the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hours after President Bush signed a law on Tuesday to combat corporate crime, key lawmakers said they were concerned he may be trying to roll back provisions that protect whistle-blowers who come forward with allegations of fraud. The law, which Bush signed with much fanfare at a White House ceremony, includes provisions protecting employees of publicly traded companies when they take "lawful acts" to assist federal regulators, law enforcement agencies, as well as "any member of Congress or any committee of Congress." Should a company retaliate against a whistle-blower, the new law would allow the person to...

<p>If Senate Democrats were truly interested in getting to the bottom of the Enron debacle, they would invite former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who is now a Citigroup director and the chairman of its executive committee, to testify under oath about what he knew of Citigroup's seemingly indispensable role in maintaining Enron's investment-grade credit rating. As Dave Boyer of The Washington Times reported yesterday, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman succinctly replied, "I don't," when asked whether he intended to call Mr. Rubin to testify.</p>

Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., fired a warning shot Wednesday at Democrats who insist President Bush is to blame for the recent wave of corporate scandals, suggesting that Republicans could easily make the case that President Clinton is far more responsible. "If there's been any permissiveness that's been involved, any kind of inappropriate conduct that has become acceptable - are they missing the Clinton administration?" Lott complained, in an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity. The top Senate Republican warned against the continued political finger pointing, but once again suggested Clinton was to blame. "There's no good...

Bush Speech Targets Corporate Lapses>{? 2002-07-11 THE recent wave of corporate scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and others is rooted partly in the dishonesty, situational ethics and technical evasiveness sown in the 1990s by Bill Clinton and his administration, and a vast expansion of government regulation will be hard- pressed to remedy it. In that context President Bush gets some good marks for his speech to Wall Street on Tuesday, in which he called for harsher penalties for convicted wrongdoers and announced creation of a "financial crimes SWAT team" that will target white-collar crimes. Given the hysteria being generated...

<p>WASHINGTON — Corporate accounting scandals in the United States and declining stock prices haven't changed the outlook for economic growth at a 3 percent to 3.5 percent annual rate by the fourth quarter, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said.</p> <p>The Bush administration is scheduled to release an update of its budget and economic forecasts Monday, and O'Neill suggested he sees no reason it should change from the forecast released in February.</p>

Professor Mike Useem of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania said recently that he attributed the new round of corporate scandals to the business climate of the late 1990s, a climate characterized by a complete lack of ethics. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker speaking at a conference at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University seconded this claim. He attributed the fraudulent accounting at Enron, Tyco and elsewhere to the miasma of a lack of business ethics that was pervasive in the 1990s. Yesterday, with the scandals now out in the open for all to...