Scandal sheet

Scandal, scandal… How dull our industry would be without it. Lucent fired four top executives in its Chinese operations for allegedly bribing officials in as many as 23 countries. The officials included the president, COO, a marketing executive and a finance manager at its China operations. According to Lucent, they violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which passed into law in 1977 after SEC investigations during the mid-1970s revealed that more than 400 companies had paid questionable or illegal payments totaling more than $300 million to foreign government officials and politicians. Under the law, executives can go to jail and U.S. companies can be fined and barred from government procurement contracts if they are found to have bribed a foreign government official. http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0407lucenfires.html

Scandal, scandal… How dull our industry would be without it. Lucent fired four top executives in its Chinese operations for allegedly bribing officials in as many as 23 countries. The officials included the president, COO, a marketing executive and a finance manager at its China operations. According to Lucent, they violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which passed into law in 1977 after SEC investigations during the mid-1970s revealed that more than 400 companies had paid questionable or illegal payments totaling more than $300 million to foreign government officials and politicians. Under the law, executives can go to jail and U.S. companies can be fined and barred from government procurement contracts if they are found to have bribed a foreign government official.

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0407lucenfires.html

And more scandal… The SEC turned up the heat on Nortel, escalating its informal inquiry into the company’s accounting to a full-blown formal investigation. Last month, Nortel said it would delay filing its 2003 annual report after an internal audit begun last fall uncovered a need to revise its previously announced unaudited results for the full year and some of its 2003 quarterly reports. Nortel also said it would restate its previously filed financial results for one or more earlier periods. The action led the company to suspend its CFO and controller. Nortel says it has been and will continue to cooperate with the SEC in its investigation.

https://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2004/0405nortsec.html

And now for the really sexy stuff: MCI announced plans for a host of security features for mobile and remote workers. The company will be partnering with Aventail to deliver Secure Sockets Layer VPN technology and plans to introduce new features to its Remote Access suite of services, including technology to detect online fraud and scramble user passwords sent over MCI’s global network, MCI said. Aventail will provide MCI with clientless SSL VPN capability for a new managed remote VPN service.

https://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2004/0406mciadds.html