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Nortel Executives Found Not Guilty On Fraud Charges
Following up on the earlier story about Nortel execs waiting for a ruling in their corporate fraud case, new submitter Unknown1337 writes "Something doesn't add up when a multi-billion dollar corporation loses it's value so quickly, but the courts have decided it wasn't intentional fraud by the executives that caused it."
"Do not attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Still, this does not pass the smell test..
That shows how good they were at cooking the books, if malpractise can't be proven. They should open a school for Creative Accounting.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.
This is one of those cases where the defendant can't possibly win.
If guilty: they dishonestly re-jigged a companies accounts so as to pay themselves a massive bonus. Fraudsters of the highest order.
If not guilty: Not the point. They were in charge of Nortel. If they (totally innocently) re-jigged the accounts thinking it would do the company good, gave themselves a massive bonus as a big pat on the back and then found the company collapsing around their ears, they're still responsible. Only instead of being fraudsters, they're dangerously incompetent.
“In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.
Download academic articles? Go to prison and be tortured for decades.
Falsify records, ruin a company for your own personal enrichment, and defraud hundreds of thousands of shareholders along the way? No fucking problem.
America is winning a worldwide race to the bottom.
Oh gee, how will they ever survive on the mere millions they've got in the bank? They might have to cut back right down to the bone, where they can no longer afford a new car every month, have to give up 3 of their 5 mistresses, and settle for only a gold swimming pool instead of the platinum one they set their little hearts on.
Nortel was subject to an organized, sustained industrial espionage effort conducted by Chinese companies. Huawei was specifically named by Brian Shields, Systems Security Advisor for Nortel at the time of the attacks (at the time Huawei supposedly were even copying Nortel's instruction manuals). Shields petitioned Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 2004, because even the CEO's computer had been compromised.
the rootkits employed on Nortel hardware were sophisticated enough to survive formatting. it wasn't until recently that Canadian Security and Intelligence Service became interested in the role Huawei had in Nortel's demise
I suggest the story of Nortel's demise has not been fully revealed. Nortel presented with a sudden, public exanguination and it has been a mystery in Canadian IT industry. This is not just another "golden parachutes" story.
And yet,
so many people who were 'against' the occupy movement and everyone still believes in trickle down economics.
Really if you think about it. Trickle up makes a lot more sense.
Why should millionaires who get another few million really spend any of it? Just add it to the pile.
I think Michael Moore did it best, he went into the Wall street buildings and tried to make some citizens arrests. That's what should've happened en mass.
It would seem that - with isolated exceptions - having wealth is a get out of responsibility free card. Society generally is more forgiving of the transgressions of the wealthy than of the working class. I wonder why this is because these transgressions can be just as serious yet we more readily forgive them. Look at past political figures and scandal: they often make comebacks. It is difficult for the working class person to make any kind of comeback after scandal. It is an interesting double standard.
What a load of bullshit.. Nortel's infamous "return to profitability" is almost a textbook example of a dying company fiddling the books. I hope that the Canadian government takes this to appeal, else it looks like Canadian corporations can get away with whatever they like if they blow enough cash on lawyers..
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And yet,
so many people who were 'against' the occupy movement and everyone still believes in trickle down economics. Really if you think about it. Trickle up makes a lot more sense.
If you succeed in destroying someone's deeply entrenched beliefs using facts and logic, that person won't change his mind but will hate your guts forever.
I was an employee of Nortel, and I do not buy this completely. It might have happened - for sure, but Nortel was so slow that even otherwise, its demise was on the cards. Once I was part of a big project - which was supposed to be 50+ people for 9 months - which in the end ballooned to 150+ people and was not over even after 2 years. Not that these sort of overruns doesnt happen in other companies - but the project itself was to implement one existing specification in their system 2 years after all their competitors. Also, the whole thing shouldnt have taken 9 months and 50+ people itself, but their language and architecture was so old that it was very non-agile and we could straightaway see it struggling with its monolithic architecture against the COTS system provided by the competitors.
For me, Nortel failed because they (1) did not innovate enough in the later years and (2) their software architecture did not move with the times. Other factors like espionage might have been a major cause, but they were still struggling a lot otherwise also.
Please note that I was a small time developer in one area, so in other areas they might have been much better. But our area was one of their lucrative ones though - so cant say either ways.
I just heard an interview with a forensic accountant who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He said he was surprised the prosecution tried to make its case on the most difficult, least provable grounds possible. He also suggested other lines of attack that would have been much more likely to get a conviction.
For anybody interested, the interview was on the CBC Radio show Metro Morning.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I like to think upper end of the spectrum intelligence is a required attribute in many of our science, engineering, mathematics, and problem-solving vocations. There are positions in industry, however, that are seemingly best suited to those with no moral compass at all. It is not that these two conditions are mutually exclusive, merely that a complete lack of ethics is the most decisive trait in determining who will Captain our industry. Very often intelligence is burdened with that pesky human condition known as empathy, and that will slow your roll at Goldman Sachs faster than a bestiality addiction.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Something doesn't add up when a multi-billion dollar corporation loses it's value so quickly"
I figured out what it is! It's the apostrophe in the word "it's." It isn't supposed to be there grammatically. Woo, tricky one but I got it.
Come on, those things were not part of the Nortel demise. Nortel's demise started long before Huawei was a serious player outside of the poorest third world countries. Huawei has also gone after CISCO's market far more than Nortel's market. Nortel collapsed due to incompetence. For example:
A small company called Xros (X as in the Greek letter Chi) was started by some guys who wanted to create a laser printer using mems technologies. The VC said "no, forget about laser printer, her is a ton of cash, go and create me an all optical switch". OK the dudes said, we'll do that, and they started working. They got some prototype stuff running. They made some in-roads into creating a sixteen channel switch etc. In 2000, they did not have much of a product, but quite a bit of prototype stuff. They were acquired by Nortel for a whopping $3.25B. A company with a handful of employees and no products.
That's how you kill a company.
What's worse is this is one of those cases where the corporation dipped into or underfunded the pension plan, so when they went under they took all their past and current employees with them.
Just imagine how you might feel having worked your whole life, retire on a fixed pension, then hear about these execs that get 12million bonus OVER their salary, and stock, to tank the company (perhaps illegally cooking books in process), which btw ends up reducing your pension income by 33% or whatever.
I'm just suprised these sort of jerks (Nortel isn't the only one) arn't beaten to death by walkers and canes from cheated pensioners.
Please note that I was a small time developer in one area, so in other areas they might have been much better
They were not. I think remember the management software side of Nortel had a couple of thousand people in it at one point in time. They produced less than tiny startups with skills did, and were utterly incapable of taking advice. At least until about 2005-6 or so. At that time they were open to advice, but it was too late.
Have to agree. I work in the physical security field, and when the unnamed 800-pound gorilla of the network world decided to enter the IP camera world I got sent to training. The first day of class we were introduced to their analog to digital encoders, an uninspiring piece of hardware without even any venting, which quickly heated up too hot to touch. During a break I looked at it with a port scanner that I was learning to use and found that Telnet was open. I opened a telnet session to the box and immediately connected without even a password prompt. Whoami got the reply 'root'. I was so shocked that I said "Holy crap!" loud enough to attract everyone's attention and had to explain what I had done. The instructor didn't seem to think that it would be much of an issue since of course everyone ran their entire security system on private networks on dedicated hardware in locked cabinets, right? The class as a whole quickly informed him what life was like in the real world. Telnet got closed in a subsequent firmware upgrade, but TFTP was still open (and accepting connections) for another two years.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I agree that Brian Shields' claims do not add up. As a fellow former Nortel employee employed at the time, it was not Huawei the execs were concerned with. The groups they were most concerned with were Cisco and Lucent. I had never heard them even mention the name of Huawei at the time (~2001 when the biggest decline started). The timeline doesn't even make sense. Supposedly, the hacking started in 2000, but the big downturn (and massive layoffs) hit throughout 2001 (in seemingly endless waves). That would have given Huawei a year to steal the tech, make sense of what they'd stolen, started fabricating cloned hardware and software, and convince buyers that their equipment was worth buying versus the incumbents in order to make a sufficient dent in Nortel's sales. At this point the telecoms generally were willing to pay a premium for known reliability in order to meet their 5 9's, there is no way in the span of one year a sufficient number of orders would have transitioned from Nortel to Huawei since the buyers would not have been convinced to go with this upstart in any significant way. Now it is possible that in the latter years (2004+) the Huawei effect was significant enough to prevent a comeback (although I doubt it; they Nortel was already too far gone), but there is virtually no way it played a significant role in the downfall.
The problem was simply that Nortel, Lucent, Cisco, and others were all in a massive game of chicken trying to expand faster than their competitors by gobbling up all the talent they could get and get products on the market as quickly as possible to claim ownership of the massive demand from the telecom bubble. When the bubble popped, there was simply no way for all the major players to survive in their newly bloated states. What was amusing is that when the downturn occurred, Nortel threw away (sold off or spun off) their older, but still highly profitable products (telephone handsets and older phone switch systems) in an effort to focus on the newer product lines that were hoped to be the future, but which few actually bought. This was silly since the stable profits from the older tech gave Nortel a significant and stable base in which to invest in the newer products and innovate. By getting rid of the older products, they slit their own throats.