Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the conviction and prison sentence of former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers. The 64-year-old defendant was convicted in 2005 of nine counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, and false SEC filings. He received a 25-year prison sentence, which all but assures that he will die in prison.<\/p>\n
WorldCom’s demise was an $11 billion accounting fraud that included improper capitalization of operating costs, among other things. It sent WorldCom, a company with stock previously valued at $180 billion, into bankruptcy. Ebbers’s defense was that the CFO, Scott Sullivan, and his subordinates committed the fraud without his knowledge.<\/p>\n
Ebbers’s attorney argued that the sentence was excessive and that Ebbers did not receive a fair trial because potential defense witnesses weren’t offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. The witnesses said they would use the fifth amendment to avoid testifying.<\/p>\n
Ebbers has been free while the appeal was pending, and is expected to be ordered to prison soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the conviction and prison sentence of former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers. The 64-year-old defendant was convicted in 2005 of nine counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, and false SEC filings. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1659,827],"tags":[1706,1705,1428],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internal-investigations","category-public-companies","tag-bernard-ebbers","tag-bernie-ebbers","tag-worldcom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-4J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}