Court Rules Ellison Must Donate $100M to Charity

PokeyPenguin writes "As part of a settlement for insider trading allegations, a California judge has ordered that Larry Ellison donate $100 million to charity. CNet reports, 'The charity payments are an unusual way to settle such a case. Typically, settlement payments would go directly to the company, in this case Oracle. "But with Mr. Ellison owning a quarter of Oracle's stock, much of such a direct payment, in effect, would have gone to him."'"

Comments

Judgement Doesn't Make Sense to Me

[putko]

The judgement doesn't make sense to me.

Typically, if someone does something bad to someone, the person doing the bad has to compensate the harmed person.

So if Ellison did something bad to the shareholders, he should pay the shareholders.

The fact that Ellison is a shareholder too doesn't matter -- all it means is, in the big scheme of things Ellison did something bad to the minority shareholders.

So Ellison could just as easily compensate only the minority shareholders -- but only as much as he hurt them.

It doesn't make sense for the judge to say, "Oh my! This case is so complex, let's just have Larry flush some money down the toilet or give it to charity, and we'll call it even."