Stock Options
Rule number one on meeting CEOs and the like: the greater the gravitas, the dodgier the business practices.
Remember the remark: “The more he talked of his principles, the faster I counted the teaspoons.”
Before we’ve got bored with CEOs moaning about how unfair Sarbanes-Oxley is to them, we find they’ve been fiddling the dates of their stock options. And it gets worse.
They’ve not only been fiddling the dates the stock options were granted, so as to maximize the increase in their value, but they’ve also been also fiddling the date the option was exercised, to minimize the tax liability.
High-tech US companies have, reportedly, set aside over $5bn to cover potential liabilities.
For some people the good times have been rolling again before the ink is dry on the regulations designed to curb the excesses of the last boom.
That was a much more exotic boom. One will never forget the birthday party for the wife of Tyco’s CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, where a life-sized statue in ice of Michelangelo’s David had neat vodka running out of its penis.
The party, it transpired later, cost $2m and half of that was charged to Tyco as ‘Chairman’s Meeting’.
It’s a grand, if vulgar, life for some.
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