Enron verdict

[chickenfeet]

Lay and Skilling have been found guilty. Assuming this holds up on appeal this is very good news indeed. What we need now is the same principles to be extended to government. I am sick and tired of "plausible deniability" in both public and private sectors. We now have hogh profile cases where senior executives have failed in using the defence that they didn't know what was going in the operations they managed. Juries just aren't that stupid mercifully.

In the political arena, the "absence of smoking gun" defence is even more prevalent and at least as sickening. To take Canada's most recent major scandal, Adscam, the only possible way that Chretien and his senior people could have avoided knowing what was going on is by making sure that they didn't hear. I suspect something very similar happened with the AWB Iraq bribery affair. I've seen something similar at closer quarters in the award of government IT contracts. No minister ever tells the bureaucrats who to award a contract to but they most certainly have ways of "indicating" who is acceptable and who is not.

Wouldn't be nice if the people who get the big salaries and the fat perks were actually held accountable for the actions of the organisations that they manage?

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yes. You might find the recent scandals here at the University of California interesting, if you've not heard of them yet.

Here's one such article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/18/MNG1IITN8S1.DTL&hw=dynes&sn=005&sc=608

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

great news. I hope that they throw the book at them *hard* in sentencing.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Me, too! it's little things like this (or not so little) that keep me going. Now, if they would not only start finding more people at the top accountable, but also (somehow, I don't know how) demonstrate that part of the problem is that these people are so insanely overcompensated and that the inherent injustice in the system is partially responsible for the abuses thereof ...

[c-mantix.livejournal.com]

Great news! And we definitely need regulatory authorities with some bite (and larger sticks) in Canada.

Wouldn't be nice if the people who get the big salaries and the fat perks were actually held accountable for the actions of the organisations that they manage?

Amen!

I worked for a tech firm during the bust and, while investors were losing money by the bucketful, the fat cats of the firm pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars by exercising their stock options as well as a few million in Provincial and Federal 'aid', all the while knowing they had a non-functional product (Hey, if I knew; they knew. You know?).