Live from Chicago, the latest Steven Skurka update:
Today marked the first time that Greenspan rose and openly took issue with a prosecutor’s tactics. “The door just can’t open every time someone says something,” an animated Greenspan declared after the prosecution sought to expand their re-direct examination of Fred Creasey. The momentum continued with Greenspan’s questions of the witness. “Is there a book that lists where accountants can round up or down?”, Greenspan asked, eliciting laughter from some of the jurors. Creasey agreed that in 2003, the audit committee of Hollinger adopted a policy that Conrad Black was permitted to use the corporate jet for all of his travels, (even to Bora Bora) because of lingering security and terrorism concerns. He also agreed that the cost of the Bora Bora trip billed to Conrad Black for his half share far exceeded the actual cost to Hollinger International. Bora Bora was carefully chosen by the prosecution as the cornerstone of its lifestyle fraud allegation against Black and by the end of Eddie Greenspan’s probing questions, it had been eviscerated.
Getting pretty predictable, isn't it?
UPDATE: Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman business school at U of T:
So who should be on trial for fraud? Should it be the board that approved the non-compete agreements? The lawyers that vetted them? The accountants that blessed the disclosure of them? The regulators, like the SEC, in whose required filings the agreements were fully laid out? Nope. None of them. They may all have been fairly pathetic and useless, but they were hardly perpetrators of fraud.
The real fraud artists are the governance theorists who have spent decades trying to convince gullible shareholders that, in combination, boards, lawyers, accountants and security regulators can and will protect them from badly behaved executives. This is, plain and simply, a myth.
