Free Republic

L. Dennis Kozlowski wants to be clear: the $6,000 shower curtain wasn't his idea. The shower curtain, bought by his decorator on Tyco International's tab for an extravagantly furnished Manhattan apartment, became perhaps the most notable symbol of an era of corporate excess and conspicuous consumption. "I understand why a $6,000 shower curtain seems indefensible," Mr. Kozlowski, Tyco's former chief executive, said on the eve of his retrial on charges of looting the company. "But I didn't know about it. I just wasn't even aware of it. If somebody had come to me and said, 'Do you want to spend...

Ex-Merrill Analyst on Tyco ChargedWed, May 28, 2003By Tim McLaughlin BOSTON (Reuters) - Securities regulators on Wednesday said they charged former Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Phua Young with issuing misleading reports on Tyco International Ltd. (NYSE:TYC - news) and accused him of improper conduct, including flying on Tyco corporate jets. While former Merrill (NYSE:MER - news) analyst and managing director Young touted Tyco's stock between 1999 and early 2002, the conglomerate traded inside information with him and even agreed to hire a private investigator to do a background check on one of his friends, industry regulator NASD said in...

Think CEO pay is out of control? Wait till you see what these guys get when they retire. For a brief, shining moment, it looked as if outrage had finally triumphed over excess. Earlier this month, soon after Delta Air Lines disclosed that CEO Leo Mullin had hauled in a bonus of $1.4 million plus $2 million in free stock in 2002, howls of protest from shareholders and employees prompted a dramatic turnabout. After all, in 2002 the airline had lost $1.3 billion, slashed thousands of jobs, and seen its stock price collapse by 58%. Mullin announced that he was...

Prosecutors have expanded their investigation of Tyco International Ltd. to include the company's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, according to a published report. Investigators are trying to determine whether the nation's largest accounting firm knew about secret bonuses that were being paid to former Tyco executives as well as accounting practices that regulators have charged were used to hide the payments, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The newspaper cited unidentified people with knowledge of the matter. Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco's former chief executive, and Mark Swartz, its former chief financial officer, have been charged with enterprise corruption and grand larceny for allegedly...

Picture a Wall Street trader striding through the doctor's waiting room and flopping down on the couch. He rages about the collapse of WorldCom, then falls silent. His therapist leans forward and asks quietly, "And how did that make you invest?" Psychologists are not new to company boardrooms or trading floors. In the 1990's, the science of market psychology became an industry as financial institutions, and especially hedge funds, hired psychologists to hone their competitive edge — be it analyzing investor choices, coaching money managers or revealing clients' unconscious desires. The use of psychotherapy by market professionals to find their...

The corporate world is now embroiled in two controversies. There's the fraud at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and elsewhere; and there's the payment of absurd sums to CEOs. Both developments threaten the free-market system--you're kidding yourself if you don't think that big firms deliberately duping investors, or CEOs awarding themselves hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to stockholders, does anything other than erode the reputation of market economics. Both practices also trample important principles of conservative economics, as we'll see in a moment. But the two controversies really aren't separate--they are one and the same. The motive...

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) - Shares of Tyco International lost more than a quarter of their value Monday after Dennis Kozlowski resigned as chairman and chief executive of the diversified conglomerate amid reports that he is under criminal investigation for allegedly avoiding New York sales taxes. The company said in a statement that Kozlowski had decided to leave the company for "personal reasons." John Fort, who served as Tyco chairman and CEO from 1982 to 1992, will assume executive responsibilities until a permanent replacement can be hired. The stock had tumbled $5.94, or 27 percent, to $16.01 by late afternoon trade....