Toronto: Nortel Fraud Charges

by Barry Artiste | June 20, 2008 at 05:19 am | 208 views | 2 comments

Opinion
Barry Artiste, Now Public Contributor
Scandal plagued Nortel takes another hit as their CEO Frank Dunn and two other exec's face fraud charges. Nortel for close to a decade had been accused of everything from outright fraud to cooking the books to inflating stock figures resulting in audits in which their stock plummetted in which thousands of Nortel employees worldwide woke up to find themselves among the unemployed as Big Wigs took Big buyouts.

Nortel has had a slew of different CEO's promising to clean house, I guess they did, starting with the corporate piggy bank.

TORONTO -- Four years after an accounting scandal battered Nortel Networks Corp., wiping out tens of billions of dollars of stock market value, police have laid fraud charges against former CEO Frank Dunn and two other former executives.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said yesterday Dunn, 54, is charged with fraud affecting the public securities market, as well as with falsification of accounts and documents and involvement in issuing a false prospectus.

A lawyer for Dunn issued a brief statement expressing confidence "the evidence will demonstrate that Mr. Dunn acted honestly and diligently in the interests of Nortel's shareholders and employees at all times, and that he will be acquitted of these charges."

Facing similar counts are former Nortel chief financial officer Douglas Beatty, 53, and former corporate controller Michael Gollogly, 49.

The men turned themselves in to police yesterday morning, appeared briefly in a courtroom in Newmarket -- about 60 km north of the Toronto financial district -- and were released on bail, said RCMP spokesman Sgt. Marc LaPorte.