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SCO Execs Dumping Stock
luigi6699 writes "According to the Salt Lake Tribune, 'SCO Group executives have sold about 119,000 shares of their company since it filed a lawsuit against IBM in March...' Their CFO started the $1.2 million sell-off just after the lawsuit."
For this kind of investor fraud, and for extortion, SCO executives should be charged as criminals. Here is an excellent Advogato article summarizing how and more of why.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
That would be called insider trading.
At least point at the source:
/. we hate BBSpot. It's only on Fark that we love Brian.
SCO Group to Shoot Babies
And haven't you heard? On
tbdean
Here's the link for those that want to see the complete rundown of insiders over the past little while at SCO...
Platform independent bug tracking software
Well, it is illegal if they're making bogus claims to get themselves in the news with the sole purpose of making their stock take off. Then they dump it all before it crashes...
Bill Gates Sold 1 Million More Microsoft Common Shares Friday ;-)
I guess he releaiszed MSFT's days are numbered
SCO not exactly "loveable" ???
Check out this additional story about SCO at the Salt Lake Tribune website.
5 years is even more scary
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
I find the article's most interesting point being that
Among the many bizarre things about the complaint, though, is that SCO itself used to be a Linux company called Caldera, and as such eagerly distributed free of charge the very same software it now is claiming infringes its copyrights.
A new CEO came up with the business strategy in the fall. But a new plan doesn't immunize the company from the precedents it helped set. It's as if a magician gave away his secrets, then started suing his audience for learning how he did his tricks.
I think this may be getting blown out of proportion ... in a previous post, i reported that their insider activity was spread around 5 execs from SCO ... i'm not sure where the 119,000 share number comes from either ... unless you're mis-calculating Form144 & Form4Option into the mix.
... and a Form4 Option is an exercise of options at a pre-determined stock price. These forms are usually, but not always, closely followed by Form4 Sells.
...
... and certainly some execs have made a some money on the over-inflated price ... but this level of paranoia just makes /. look bad.
For the record, a Form144 is not a sell, but simply an insider registration of stock previously unknown to the public float
By my calcs, the execs have cashed out for a total of 75k shares worth <$900k between the 5 of them. Not exactly the criminal mastermind plot the article made it out to be
There is a lot to bash SCO about nowdays
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
SCOX Insider & restricted shareholder transactions reported over the last two months
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
If you read the article to its end and clicked the right-arrow at the bottom you get this article:
SCO not exactly the lovable little guy
I think it's pretty hilarious that SCO can't even get their local press to show them in a good light.
There's two ways of looking at it. The more jaded among us might point our fingers at insider trading, and the use of the lawsuit to pump up the stock price before bailing.
Then again, Wilson and the others (most of whom I've never seen interviewed in a Linux/IBM/SCO lawsuit-related article) might be part of the Caldera old-guard who believe that the lawsuit is stupid, baseless, or suicidal and are using this opportune time to pull out of an investment that they believe is doomed to fail.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
"funny" to see that when SCO started the whole thing, investors believed them, but since IBM, RedHat among others (e.g. Germany) responded it has been a bear-ride *yeeehaa!!*
-> man, the last comment fits my sig
(yes this can be compared with sex)
There is nothing wrong with making money when a company's sock goes up.
However what is illegal is when you use fraud to pump up the level to sell off. You basically have Executive Officers canibalize the company at cost of shareholds so they can make a profit. This isn't what shareholders bought into. This isn't what Execs are supposed to do with companies.
This has always been a weakness in the system. When the CEO sees profit, why operate in a manner that is healthy for the company? The only thing standing in the way is the government who can and will take all of the ill gotten money and throw you in prison.
I'm suprised no one posted this before:
Insider and Form 144 Filings at SCO
That's a completely different situation though ... Home Depot is a retail company, SCO is .. ehm, something else.
...
....
The merchandise that home depot has is merely kept in order to be sold off, it's not "owned" by the company. As a shareholder, therefore, you do not have the right to just go and take merchandise, but you do have the right to go in to a shareholders meeting and tell them what you think the company should do to improve their sales of merchandise.
With SCO, you have more of a chance of being able to get away with saying that you're a part owner of the IP, because the intellectual property is OWNED by the company, and hence the shareholders do too
But of course it's not worth trying to figure that one out because buying SCO stock now would be completely retarded, and buying it so you didn't have to pay the BS licensing fees is doubly retarded.
so, in the end, does it even matter? who knows
ìì!
This doesn't mean they expect to lose. People sell stock all the time to do things like buy a house or invest elsewhere even if the stock is doing well. They could trying to diversify, anyone smart does so at least to some degree, especially if they have a family.
Yahoo lists 82k insider shares sold in the last 6 months. This is only 1.4 percent of insider holdings. Even if the number is much higher this is not a huge exodus yet. In fact it shows a bit of confidence. After all, this was a $2 stock in January.
This could be taken as SCO's officers hedging their bets, however its hard to say because no matter how lousy SCO's situation might be if it loses, these people may be already diversified well enough with outside holdings to risk it all. It's tough to say is really what this means. The CEO's cash salary was only $82k last year. We all know a CEO can't possibly live on that little. Maybe he needed a Bentley. Hard to say.
Now if they were buying shares, that would say a lot more about the case. People sell for many reasons, but there is only one reason to buy: you think the stock is going to go up and stay up until the next selling period for insiders.
I wonder what the various linux companies are doing?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Look at SCO VP Wilson did. He bought at very low prices 12,000 shares for $7920 and turned around and sold the shares for about $129,000. That is a nice profit.
2003-07-15 WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN
Senior Vice President 6,000 Option Exercise at $0.66 per share.
(Cost of $3,960)
2003-07-15 WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN
Senior Vice President 6,000 Sale at $10.66 - $10.8 per share.
(Proceeds of about $64,000)
2003-07-14 WILSON, MICHAEL
Senior Vice President 6,000 Option Exercise at $0.66 per share.
(Cost of $3,960)
2003-07-14 WILSON, MICHAEL
Senior Vice President 6,000 Sale at $10.77 - $10.87 per share.
(Proceeds of about $65,000)
WSJ.com - Portals
Nice to see some friendly high profile coverage here. Thanks Lee!
Jared
Since you have to borrow the stock, someone has to loan it to you. Typically, your broker would loan you the stock. SCOX is not widely held and there aren't many shares outstanding, so it is known as a hard to borrow stock, making it very hard to short. I write software for a stock trading company and SCOX is on our list of stocks we can't short.
I read in Adbusters once. It was about revoking corporate personhood. Used to be that corporations existed at the sufferance of the public. They were allowed to operate for fixed periods of time, like 5 or ten years. Sort of like the Hudson's Bay Company. At the end of that time they had to petition to renew their right to exist. If they behaved badly, they were squashed like bugs.
Then there was a landmark case in this country back in the 1800's (Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad) that established that corporations are legal persons. They have all the rights that an actual person has, except they exist potentially forever and don't have any of the responsibilities that you and I have. So essentially General Electric is in the eyes of the law an incredibly large, multi-billionaire. But unlike you or I, GE cannot now be put to death for its crimes.
Adbuster suggested that either we revoke corporate personhood, or we institute the death penalty for corporations that cannot behave. Ahem, can anyone think of any corporations we might apply this to?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
And here we have a shining example of the modernized version of the pump and dump. It's too bad that business laws are changed only after at least one company takes advantage of others.
It's not just that, there's been some shady dealings from SCO's major owner, the Canopy Group: article here. Something about a stock swap using inflated SCO shares to acquire Vultus which is a web services firm also owned by the Canopy Group. What's surprising is how the hype and disruption and the $3billion lawsuit claim are so out of proportion to the money they're actually making from this fraud. Execs sell $1.2M of stock. Vultus deal was $3M. Microsoft pays $25M. Almost like a mugger killing a guy to steal 20 bucks.
- Bawa Opindar, VP Global Services
- Bought: 7,912 shares
- Sold: 22,916 shares
- Gain: $ 132,746.40
- Robert K. Bench, CFO
- Sold: 18,000 shares
- Gain: $ 153,531.50
- Ronald Charles Broughton, Sr VP Int'l Sales
- Sold: 45,000 shares
- Gain: $ 546,749.50
- Jeff F Hunsaker, VP Worldwide Mktng
- Sold: 15,000 shares
- Gain: $ 170,194.60
- Michael P Olson, VP Finance
- Sold: 14,000 shares
- Gain: $ 135,928.00
- Michael Sean Wilson, Sr VP Corp Dev
- Bought: 12,000 shares
- Sold: 12,000 shares
- Gain: $ 121,365.00
Total ill-gotten gains: $ 1,260,515.00All this and more may be found at SCOX's SEC Page.
Dunno whi I'm bothering to respond to this -- not like anyone will see this comment, but you need to realize that shares owned by corporate officers are what is called "restricted stock" (rule 144 of the NASD if I recall). You can't simply dump all the shares you have at one time. You must first file a form wtih the NASD or SEC indicating that you intend to sell x number of shares (how do you think Yahoo can report on the shares sold by corp. officers?). There are rules around how many shares you can sell at one time, usually relative to the total shares outstanding.
The rule was put in place to discourage insider trading and prevent corporate officers from affecting the market for a given security. Imagine if an officer had a controlling interest of shares outstanding. He could just dump all his stock at once, and cause the market for that stock to tank.
Also imagine if these rules weren't in place. McBride and friends could dump it all at once, fold up, and leave the rest of the investors high and dry.
Given all this, it's not surprising the seemingly unimpressive figure of 2% of insider shares have only been sold --- yet. The rules were designed to slow this sort of thing down.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
Scox is a canopy company.
Canopy just won a $40 million settlement from CA.
Canopy is indirectly suing IBM though a company they control: scox.
Canopy won a huge settlement with microsoft: also by using scox, then called caldera.
Top exec at scox, sontag I think, said: "contracts are what you use against people."
Canopy controls about two dozen shell companies. All in the same area of Utah, all owned by Mormons. All the top execs are graduates of BYU, all sit on each others boards of directors, all have long business histories together. All own stock in each other, and trade that stock frantically.
If you do business with Canopy, Canopy will sue you - it's as simple as that. That is the only reason Canopy does business with another company.
Canopy companies don't really produce anything. They try to figure ways to sue other companies, and they do it very well.
From the SL Trib:
...Computerworld recently ran an article detailing how SCO's backers are cashing in its stock in a complex transaction involving purchase of a company owned by the Canopy Group, a Utah investment concern that also owns a big chunk of SCO.
a gement/story/0,10801,83452,00.html
An SCO spokesman said the report's allegations of a "shell game" weren't true, and added that SCO has no control over its stock price.
Here's (I'm pretty sure) the article mentioned:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/man
If you want a copy, I've put it on here. Just copy it over to /usr/share/man/man1 and then type "man sco" from your favorite shell...
Please be gentle, my webserver is a PPro 200 with 128MB, on an ADSL line that's allegedly 1500/128. I can't believe I'm voluntarily slashdotting my own server, but this is worth it!
Have fun *grin*
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.