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Shake-up At SonicBlue
InfoMinister writes "Good story at SiliconValley.com. The lead tells the tale: "In a boardroom drama rivaling its courtroom battle with Hollywood, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Potashner, was ousted Thursday after he demanded board members repay more than a half million dollars in loans they gave themselves to buy stock in an affiliated company.""
Greg Ballard was former CEO of 3dfx before it crashed. 3dfx is a terrible story of mismanagment of manager abuse. As a company, 3dfx existed to make money for it's managers, and for no one else--and Mr Ballard was at the helm then for 3dfx, and now for SonicBlue. Do the words Golden Parachute mean anythign to you Mr Ballard? If anyone is investing in SonicBlue, I'd pull out...
It's a good thing this sort of illicit loaning only goes on in the corporate world... Wait a sec, you mean it happens in government too?
I'll tell you what's being taught:
Parents:
"Son, get your MBA. I'm proud of you and want you to make scads of money."
Friends:
"MBA? You're so smart. You'll make so much more money than I will with my BA in Art History, which I enjoy very much."
Business Administration:
"In times of decreased customer expenditure, it is often appropriate to reduce resources to appease the stockholders."
Business Ethics:
"Humans are our greatest resource."
Marketting:
""
Accounting:
"Payroll is the most expensive operating expense of any business."
Business Frat Poster:
"Win real money in our fantasy stock game! Each person gets $10k to play the market and the person with the most cash after just 30 days is the recipient of a $1000 datek account thanks to Takka Alla Profits"
Smart folks are filling in the blanks, mate. Customers are not always right -- they're the morons who fell for our marketting. Employees? Get the best we can get for the shit we're paying...young folks especially, and train them to work 10 hour days. Your only boss is the stockholders, and these guys will believe anything that shounds like it will make them money.
Lying? Don't get caught. Stealing? Give it a nice name. Executives have privilidge, or else they wouldn't be executives, eh? We're better than those 30k plebians. Offer them 28k and we'll get Mexican -- how does Mexico sound? Shit, we should move our corporate office there...cheap work, no taxes, and thanks to NAFTA no bloody tariffs.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It is not quite that simple. No lending agency in the world is going to give you a line of credit or venture capital without some sort of financial guarantee. When I got the line of credit for my company, I had to put my house up as collateral as well as have justification (in the form of past and present POs) for the loan amount.
This situation is different. SonicBlue seems to have had cash reserves and/or available credit and elected to make unguaranteed loans to shareholders. It looks very shady and might be illegal, at least from a tax accounting point of view. But, you do need to have an established business with cash or at least a great line of BS to feed VCs to get them to front you the money.
IANAAccountant.
'No, you are wrong.' Maybe a better phrase would be 'We seem to hold differing opinions'?
The original poster is quite correct that the reason to start a compnay is to beneift the founders. Reduced liability, access to greater funds etc. Share holders only benefit if the company chooses to let them. Microsoft does not pay dividends.
Having worked in merchant banks, stock exchanges and futures markets I can say without a moments hesitiation that the markets are rigged and no amount of legislation is going to stop that.
The nice thing at the moment is that the worst offenders of corporate theft are getting exposed. But until companies are forced to publish every financial transation on their books investors will never be sure they are with one of the very small minority of companies that has an ethical board.
'MANY others companies...' drivel, pure drivel. Companies are neither good or bad. Aside from good/bad being totally subjective there is the point that companies should not be judged rather the people who invest/manage/work there should be judged. For instance, the Red Cross has taken millions of dollars after Spet. 11th for the purpose of helping the families. They have released very little of these funds, where is the money going? Now is the Red Cross bad? Is the management bad?
WTF are you talking about? This is misinformation, moderated up as informative. You can short whatever stock you want, as long as a shareholder is willing to loan it to you. Perhaps your broker limits you based on your limited investment experience, but there is no limit built-in to the (US) stock markets, below which you cannot sell something short.
Read this and then consider what you can do to help.a r.htm
http://brutusworks.com/politics/bribe_baza