Quotes of the Day
Move over, Martha. As the troubled phone company now known as MCI prepares to emerge from the brink, its erstwhile commander, Bernard Ebbers, may be headed for the pen. Ebbers is the folksy former Mississippi high school basketball coach who hatched WorldCom in 1983 and, through a series of audacious takeovers, built it into the second largest U.S. long-distance operator. But his single-minded pursuit of growth and, in the end, his manic desperation to please Wall Street led him to mastermind, according to his federal criminal indictment last week, an accounting fraud estimated by some experts at $11 billion, the largest in U.S. history.
If you're keeping score at home, that's about $10,999,955,000 more in financial skulduggery than was involved in Martha Stewart's trial. (Stewart saved $45,000 by selling her ImClone shares when she did.) No one embodies late 1990s speculation more than Ebbers, 62, who as CEO of a high-flying telecom operated at the epicenter of the tech bubble. Ebbers grew unimaginably rich on paper by securing millions of stock options. When WorldCom's growth machine began to sputter so did its stock price, denting Ebbers' net wealth. Yet he tapped WorldCom's cash reserves for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to buy even more stock plus a huge ranch in British Columbia, a Georgia yacht builder and a minor league hockey team. (He still owns a golf club and a lumber business in Mississippi.) To keep WorldCom afloat, prosecutors charge, Ebbers allegedly resorted to a combination of hype, hidden expenses and phantom revenue to inflate earnings by all those billions and perpetuate the illusion that WorldCom was worth its lofty share price. When the hoax finally emerged, the stock went into a slow-motion collapse from 2000 through 2002, costing investors $180 billion — three times the amount of wealth destroyed at Enron.
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A few hours before Ebbers was indicted, Scott Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer and one-time Ebbers crony, pleaded guilty to conspiring with him to conceal WorldCom's weakening results and submitting false reports to investors and regulators. Sullivan, who is now cooperating with prosecutors, will likely be the key witness against Ebbers. According to the indictment, Sullivan urged Ebbers in a September 2000 meeting to issue a warning to investors that revenue was running below expectations — a warning that would have hurt the stock price. Ebbers refused, the government charges, and the two men agreed to take steps to inflate profits.
The trial will be far more complicated than Stewart's. For one, jurors will have to parse evidence based on accounting issues that are complex and deadly dull. And there are nagging questions as to why Ebbers, who held almost all his WorldCom stock until the bitter end, didn't dump more shares if he knew the price was propped with bogus financials.
As for Ebbers' renamed company, MCI, it's free of its former bosses but faces bone-crushing competition from Verizon and others entering the long-distance market. There probably isn't enough business for all three dedicated long-distance firms: AT&T, Sprint and MCI. A spiffed-up MCI coming out of bankruptcy court could quickly become takeover bait. And that would end this corporate saga pretty much where it began.
- Daniel Kadlec