Life Glow Plus
Super Life Glow
Life Glow Basic
Bone Dense Calcium
Taheebo Life Tea
Germanium
Colloidal Minerals
Methyl Sulfonyl Methane
Transfer Factor
 

Vibrant Life Home Web
All VL Products
Family Of Three Chelation Formulas
Oral Chelation Ingredient Comparisons

The Wednesday Letter
Karl Loren Viewpoints
Frequently Asked Questions
Testimonials

Free Radicals
Central Page For 18 Web Sites
Vibrant Life Home Page

Shopping Cart

Separate Search Page
or search below


Navigation Help

Karl Loren Background

Ingredients Technical Write To Karl Loren Table Of Contents

As the Bubble Neared Its End, Bogus Swaps Padded the Books

This article illustrates on a grand scale the type of corruption which often exists on a tiny, tiny scale among those who join Multi-Level-Marketing companies, like the Q2 company from which this page is linked.

I, Karl Loren, on November 12, 2006, have unique inside information on how a large billion dollar fraud can corrupt a small guy into a small fraud.

In this Wall Street Journal (below) the Chief Operating Officer wanted "sales" that he could put on the books of Qwest International, so that his earlier predictions to the stock analysts could come true.

Meanwhile small guys in Qwest, seeing the corruption of the large guys, created their own way of stealing from the stockholders. They "sold" phone time at a bargain rate, say 1/10th of a penny per minute -- far lower than anyone else paid. This was a "bargain" for the buyer. But, the buyer paid them a private kickback! So, the company lost money they could have made and the corrupt middle-manager made a stolen profit -- stolen from whom? -- the stockholders.

The facts:

Qwest, the No. 4 U.S. local phone company, serves customers in 14 Western states. Based in Denver, Qwest Communications International Inc. has come under fire over criminal and ethical allegations. Nacchio himself is under federal indictment on insider-trading charges. (Source For data about Qwest)

In other words, his pay, his stock options, etc., depended in part on the price of his company's stock.  If the company could predict a "sales increase" of 23% for some coming financial period, the stock prices would probably go up with just that announcement.

Then, when that period came along if the company was able to "report" company sales DID increase and earnings DID go up by 23%, then the stock prices went even higher.

So, he created a "sales increase" of $500,000,000 by "selling" that much of his future phone connection services to "someone."  That would be a "sale" and so far, so good.  The sale is part of the earnings, even if the services have not been delivered yet.

Now, if you looked further into the deal you will find that Qwest "sold" these services, but had agreed to get "paid" for these services by "buying" phone connection services worth $500,000,000 from another phone company!

Lo and behold! The other company also had an earnings increase of $500,000,000 on THEIR books.

Everyone wins?

Well, not the stock holders!

Obviously the COO was using a "definition" of "sale" that was not what you might have used for this transaction.

You can see how very basic is this concept of "definitions of words."

Those who would deceive you very often use words that you think you understand, but they are putting some different definition to the word -- different from what what definition you would use.

In this case, of course, the COO was using a definition that differed from "standard accounting rules."

He was eventually caught.  The Company was caught doing LOTS of this, and eventually had to admit to cooking the books for about $1 billion. That is an awful lot of infections greed.

It was "OK," of course, because "everyone is doing it!"

In other words once the greed starts, just as it starts in fraudulent MLM companies, the greed becomes infectious, and widespread.

Then, "it can't be wrong!" because "everyone is doing it!"

You can defy gravity only so long, before you fall to the earth!

Read the full details below -- a different company, but the same old corruption -- how infectious greed was very widespread during the Clinton era of immorality.  We will never know the full harm done by a President of the United States lying to the American public ("I never had sex with that woman!") or Wall Street that went crazy with infectious greed.

 


The Wall Street Journal  

August 9, 2002

Source
TELECOMMUNICATIONS

WorldCom Finds More Errors; Restatement Will Be $7.2 Billion

By JARED SANDBERG and SUSAN PULLIAM
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 

WorldCom Inc., already facing civil charges for accounting fraud, said it would expand its planned financial restatement to $7.2 billion as a result of additional accounting irregularities. 

The telecommunications giant, which previously planned to restate $3.85 billion for last year and part of this year, disclosed that an internal review of its accounting produced additional improperly booked items.

The Clinton, Miss., company, which had warned its revision would grow, says it will have to revise its financials for the year 2000, in addition to the planned restatements for 2001 and the first quarter of 2002.

The new charges effectively would wipe out WorldCom's profits for all of 2000, just as the prior ones erased earnings for 2001. The new information also raises questions about whether the bulk of the company's profits during the end of the telecom boom were generated through accounting gimmicks.The disclosure indicates the company inflated profits by an additional $3.3 billion starting in 1999 and continuing through 2002. The company also said it could be forced to take a massive $50 billion write-off related to goodwill -- a figure roughly double the $20 billion to $30 billion it estimated just a few months ago.The new items were discovered by a team that included WorldCom audit and finance staffers and its external auditor, KPMG LLP.

WorldCom, which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, told the Securities and Exchange Commission more than a month ago that it had found "odd" transactions and clarified their nature to the agency again last week, said a person familiar with the matter.

The latest disclosure could put top executives in charge at the time -- including WorldCom's former chief financial officer Scott Sullivan -- in more legal jeopardy. The timing of the items is significant because they occurred at a time when Mr. Sullivan and other executives and board members were selling stock.

The previous restatement by WorldCom of $3.8 billion occurred during the year 2001 and the first quarter of 2002, a five-quarter period during which insider sales were relatively sparse.Mr. Sullivan, who was charged by the U.S. Justice Department last week with securities fraud and making false filings, sold shares valued at $18.1 million, according to Thomson Financial/Lancer Analytics.

Other executives and board members, including ousted chief executive Bernie Ebbers, his successor John Sidgmore and director Francesco Galesi also sold shares during 2000.Mr. Sidgmore said he had no knowledge of the accounting improprieties at the time he sold, and that he still owns half of his original stock. Mr. Ebbers, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Galesi couldn't be reached for comment.

But the latest revelations could potentially result in investigators charging some WorldCom executives with insider selling in addition to fraud charges, said one person familiar with the situation.Prosecutors generally are reluctant to go to trial if they can't easily establish a motive, but the latest restatements during a period of insider sales could provide them with a possible motive. Prosecutors also are likely to use the latest revelations in their efforts to convince Mr. Sullivan to cooperate with their investigation.

Revelation of the improperly booked expenses -- which collectively amount to a restatement of more than 12 times those disclosed at Enron Corp. last year -- also is expected to delay WorldCom's plans to deliver a turnaround business plan and financial results scrubbed clean of the fraud.For example, a business plan was on track to be delivered to lenders and others as soon as this week, said people familiar with the situation.

It may now be the end of the month, those people said. Until KPMG can deliver its audited report, it isn't even clear whether WorldCom has positive or negative cash flow.Another question stemming from the latest accounting problems is whether WorldCom will need more money from its lenders.

WorldCom has received $750 million of interim financing as part of a debtor-in-possession loan that could total as much as $2 billion. Within the next month, the bankers providing the loan -- Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and General Electric Co.'s GE Capital -- had planned to try to find other banks to help provide the financing.WorldCom had said the interim funding would be enough to keep it operating until a Sept. 4 bankruptcy-court hearing, where it had been expected to get approval for access to the full bank loan.

But even that process could be delayed, said the people familiar with the situation.Though WorldCom has warned its restatement could grow, the larger-than-expected amount raises the question of whether the company, which has hired its own internal investigator and appointed two new board members with accounting and enforcement expertise, can ever overcome its tremendous loss of credibility.

"It makes it very difficult for the creditors to work effectively with the company when these surprises keep emerging," said Jim Harris, a professor of management at Columbia University in New York. Mr. Harris said he thinks the company needs new management. Mr. Sidgmore said the latest disclosure "shows this company is willing to stand up and do the right thing.

"Some of the items in question relate to overstatement of revenue and the same improper capitalizing of expenses that constituted the original $3.85 billion scandal, said people familiar with the matter. Other improprieties include a series of so-called reserve reversals, which are funds companies typically set aside to cover the estimated cost of a future event.

Once the cost is incurred, any additional funds can be reversed back into earnings. Reserves at WorldCom related to taxes, litigation, uncollectible receivables and acquisition-related expenses.Generally accepted accounting principles permit companies to estimate reserves, but the SEC, which began investigating WorldCom's accounting of reserves in March, requires that the estimates aren't overly aggressive.

Regulators have contended that some companies wrongly set aside reserves and later reverse these actions to pad or massage earnings when they fall short of expectations. Regulators, auditors and investigators have already been looking at whether WorldCom used such reserves in order to meet Wall Street's earnings estimates.-- Carrick Mollenkamp in Atlanta and Deborah Solomon in New York contributed to this story.

Write to Jared Sandberg at jared.sandberg@wsj.com4 and Susan Pulliam at susan.pulliam@wsj.com5

Updated August 9, 2002 10:00 a.m. EDT


 

How about YOUR question here?

Read below or choose another question.


Are These Vitamins Natural?

Oral chelation means taking Cysteine or EDTA through the mouth

Is This MLM? Where Can I Learn About Cysteine?
Do Viruses Cause Disease? Where Can I Learn About Niacin?
Why Do People Take Vitamins? What About Prayer?
What Is Oral Chelation? EDTA Compared With Cysteine
What Is Fraudulent Taheebo? What Is  This Niacin Flush?
Why So Critical Of The AHA? What About Black Walnut As An Oral Chelation Nutrient?
How Long Should I Take Life
Glow Plus, What Results Can I Expect?
Why Should I buy your product when there are many others available at lower prices?
My Hands Have Gotten Warmer! Does Life Glow Plus Lower Cholesterol?  What if my cholesterol goes UP after taking Life Glow Plus?
What About Coumadin? Karl Loren:   What Are Your Credentials For These Claims?

What Are The Mechanics Of Chelation Therapy?

What Does Karl Loren Recommend For Diet?
Will Taking ZOLOFT Interfere With Taking Life Glow Plus? Why Does The FDA Do What
It Does?
Can Oral Chelation Prevent Or
Cure Cancer?
Where Do The Colostrum Cows Come From?
Can Phenylalanine Cause High Blood Pressure? Is Dilantin Dangerous?
Prescription Drugs Are Now
The #4 Killer!
ADD In Kids?
Karl, would you please listen to this cassette tape? How Is Drug Marketing
Changing?
Karl, I feel tired all the time! Useful Role Of The FDA?
How Do You Treat Dog Bites? What About Tobacco
Help Me Get My Son Off Cytoxin What If You Take Less Than The Recommended Dose?
What Is A Good Cleansing Program Ritalin
The Schoolyard Killer
How Can A Doctor Commit Murder and Get Away With It? What   Is The  Shelf Life Of Your Vitamins

Do You Have Independent Labs Test Your Ingredients?

What About Human Growth Hormone?  HGH?
For Your Transfer Factor?  Where Do The Cows Come From?  How Healthy? Another Chelation Doctor Proves His Ignorance of how EDTA works -- Dr. Whitaker
Complexity Leads To Death -- Simplicity Leads To Life This Woman Is Doomed!
What is the VERY BEST Schedule For Taking Your Oral Chelation Capsules

Karl, What About The Calcium Deposits In My Breasts?  Microcalcification?

What Can I Do About My Bent Penis -- Peyronie's Disease

Do Viruses Cause Disease?

The Mechanics of HOW Chelation Works

The "heated cholesterol" Fraud?
They Want Me To Get Tested! What Should I do?

Muscle Testing -- Kinesiology -- Valid Or Not?

Dr. Julian Whitaker Claims Oral Chelation Is No Good!  What Do You Say? What About Seasilver?  Or  The Latest MLM?
The Q2 Machine:  Mysterious Science Pulls In Greedy Suckers What About Coral Calcium?  Mr. Barefoot?
Milk!  The (Now) Dangerous Food! How To Tell If MSM Is The Real  Stuff!

Comparing Clathration with Chelation

Is It True? That You Refuse To Sell Anything To Anyone Taking Certain Drugs?
Can Chelation Cause Mercury To MOVE From The Body INTO The Brain? How Can I Buy Cheap EDTA?
Low Body Temperature -- Wilson's Syndrome How Can I Help Persuade My Friend To Use Alternative Methods?
Formatting Karl's Newsletter? I'm A Reporter.  Will You Help Me With My Story?
What Is The Vibrant Life Guarantee? Karl Loren's Advice About Diabetics
What Are The Vibrant Life Purposes? What is the Mohs Procedure For Skin Cancer
The Bio terrorism Act Of 2002 -- The Beginning Of The Need For Recognition of Change

Acid Reflux
Esophageal Cancer

Mental Causation Of Heart Disease

My Husband Just Had A Massive Heart Attack In The ER!

Oral Chelation Frauds

What Treats Autism?

Source

The Wall Street Journal  

December 23, 2002

PAGE ONE

As the Bubble Neared Its End, Bogus Swaps Padded the Books

By DENNIS K. BERMAN, JULIA ANGWIN and CHIP CUMMINS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 

It was 10 p.m. on a Friday, 50 hours before Qwest Communications International Inc. was due to close the books on its third quarter of 2001. Chief Operating Officer Afshin Mohebbi sat down in his 52nd floor office at the telephone giant's Denver headquarters and tapped out a desperate e-mail to his top salesmen.

The subject line: "Help!!!!!!!!!"

[Fifth in a series]

Mr. Mohebbi was alarmed because a series of sweet deals he urgently needed weren't working out. The plan was for Qwest to swap connections to its phone network for connections to other companies' networks. Phone companies had been making trades like that for years, but lately there was a twist: Both companies would book revenue from these transactions -- inflating their financial results even though they were actually swapping assets of equal value.

But Qwest couldn't quite make these latest swaps work. It had agreed to buy $231 million in access to telecom networks. But the companies on the other side of the table had committed to spend less than $100 million with Qwest. The company was going to have to squeeze more money out of the deals if it was going to meet the projections it had given Wall Street.

"What happened to the creativity of this company and its employees?" Mr. Mohebbi wrote in his e-mail. "Let's not have a disaster now."

In the end, disaster did strike. Ten months later, Qwest's new chief executive, Richard Notebaert, soberly read a script during a Monday morning conference call with press and stock analysts. He announced that the company's swaps had violated accounting rules. The company later said it would restate $950 million in revenue, erasing the deals in a stroke from the company's prior results.

When the business history of the past decade is written, perhaps nothing will sum up the outrageous financial scheming of the era as well as the frenzied swapping that marked its final years. Internet companies such as Homestore Inc. milked revenue from complex advertising exchanges with other dot-coms in ultimately worthless deals. In Houston, equal amounts of energy were pushed back and forth between companies. The beauty of the deals, from the perspective of the participants, was that everyone walked away with roughly the same amount of revenue to put on their books.

But the swaps rage turned out to be no bargain for investors. The bad deals contributed to an epidemic of artificially inflated revenue. In many cases, swaps slipped through legal loopholes left in place by regulators who had failed to keep pace with the ever-changing dealmaking of ever-changing industries. The unraveling of those back-scratching arrangements helped usher in the market collapse and led to the realization by investors that the highest-flying industries of the boom era -- telecom, energy, the Internet -- were built in part on a combustible mix of wishful thinking and deceit.

Bogus swaps added up to a far bigger piece of American commerce than is widely recognized. The amount of restated revenue from bad swaps totals more than $15 billion since 1999, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. That number is especially significant since investors focused on revenue in new industries that often had little earnings to show for themselves. Investigators are still trying to figure out whether Enron Corp. conducted illegal reciprocal energy trades, dubbed wash trades by regulators.

Swaps were used by at least 20 public companies. Some, including AOL Time Warner Inc., CMS Energy Corp. and Global Crossing Ltd., the onetime telecom highflier now in bankruptcy proceedings, are under federal investigation.

'A Normal Part of Operations'

It's no accident that the swaps frenzy sprung up in industries with newfangled, intangible products. After all, putting a price tag on online ads, energy or telecom-transmission contracts, and moving them back and forth, is a lot trickier than dealing with a fleet of trucks or a cement plant. Swaps essentially involved "manipulating an abstraction," says Andrew Lipman, a telecom attorney in Washington. "These swaps morphed into devices to satisfy the God of quarterly performance."

[chart]
 

Along the way, the reciprocal deals became an accepted part of a business culture obsessed with revenue growth. "If we're one of their big customers, we expect them to be one of our big customers," Robert Pittman, then co-chief operating officer of AOL's America Online unit, said in an interview last year. One AOL executive even approached the operator of subsidiary Time Inc.'s cafeteria about buying online ads in return for AOL's continued business. The company, Compass Group North America, declined.

And while Wall Street types are now griping that they were deceived by these arrangements, until recently they were applauding swap deals and the companies that favored them. In a research report in 2001, a Goldman Sachs telecom analyst downplayed Global Crossing's collapsing stock price. He wrote that the company's swaps "make sense, they are a normal part of operations .... the accounting is correct.'' The company filed for Chapter 11 protection in January.

Swaps have been around since Old Testament days, when Joseph traded food for the horses and donkeys of hungry Egyptians. When it comes to business history, the practice has been less noble. In the 1980s, corrupt savings and loans traded real estate back and forth at increasingly overblown prices. This was known as trading "a dead horse for a dead cow.''

The telecom industry for decades got around the expense of building fiber-optic lines by exchanging access to each other's networks, known in telecom lingo as trading capacity. Each year starting in 1975 at the Global Traffic Meeting in Washington, a club of about 200 telecom officials made deals to exchange millions of minutes of voice traffic. Those deals were legal and companies usually didn't record revenue from the trades.

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF SWAPS
 
Old Testament, Genesis 47
As adviser to Pharaoh, Joseph trades food for horses, donkeys and land of famished Egyptians. He later lets them use the land in exchange for 20% tax.

 

1626
According to legend, Peter Minuit, an agent for the Dutch West India Company, swaps wampum beads, metal knives and wool blankets for island of Manhattan.

 

1980s
During savings and loan scandals, land speculators swap property back and forth at increasingly inflated values. They call it "swapping a dead horse for a dead cow."

 

1992
A trader at commodities firm Mitsubishi creates false profits by repeatedly buying and selling mispriced wheat contracts at Minneapolis Grain Exchange.

 

1998
In a $1 billion deal, Williams Communications and Winstar Communications trade long-distance and local telecom access. This is widely regarded as the deal that starts the telecom swapping craze.

 

2001
CMS Energy and Dynegy simultaneously execute two sets of massive electricity trades worth $1.7 billion on Dynegy's online trading platform. They cancel each other out, but boost trading volumes on the platform.

Everything changed when the industry was deregulated, starting in the mid-1990s. Telecom companies bloomed, laying miles of new fiber. By late 2000 it became obvious that there was nowhere near enough customer demand to use up all the capacity.

Stoking the Telecom Fires

"Everyone was scratching their heads about how to make the numbers," recalls Derek Gill, a former vice president at 360networks, which filed for bankruptcy in June 2001.

A Canadian telecom builder, 360networks held what salespeople dubbed "stoke the fire" meetings, another former 360networks employee says. They stood up before top executives and listed closed deals and sales prospects. People who didn't deliver their quotas "were considered failures," adds Mr. Gill. "I talked to my friends across the industry and no one was selling.''

That's when swaps began to take on an entirely new motive: adding revenue onto quarterly financial results. Facing mounting pressure in late 2000 and early 2001, telecoms turned each other into their best customers. It was an industry in which competing executives were already close.

They had worked and played together at events such as the annual meeting of the Pacific Telecommunications Council in Honolulu, which featured fireworks and a bare-chested, drum-banging Hawaiian dance troupe.

Global Crossing had a cozy relationship with Qwest. In 1999 and 2000, they bought assets from one another that their engineers had requested to meet specific needs. By 2001, Global Crossing began doing deals to acquire what it might need in the future. It started booking revenue from the deals in 2000.

Qwest began booking revenue from swaps in 1999. A spokesman says that the company is cooperating with various federal investigations. An attorney for Mr. Mohebbi, who is leaving his chief operating officer post at Qwest this month, says his client didn't encourage employees to break any rules.

Global Crossing sales executives reviewed lists of the company's purchases of access from other telecoms and then pressed those companies to reciprocate by buying access from Global Crossing, a former official says. The company's dealmaking moved at such a furious pace that an internal memo in July 2001 noted that "unfortunately, little is known about what we actually acquired in past deals.''

"The buzz was that when we saw an announcement for $300 million or $500 million, we thought it was b---s---," says John Shaban, an executive director at Emergia USA, a subsidiary of Spain's Telefonica S.A. "The first question was, is it a swap? If it was, who cares?"

Working Backward

At companies such as Global Crossing and 360networks, a lot of folks cared. In March 2001, 14 officials from the two companies convened at the offices of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, Global Crossing's New York law firm, to try to make an unwieldy deal work.

The idea was for Global Crossing to exchange $150 million of its capacity between Asia and San Francisco for $200 million of 360networks' capacity linking the U.S. and Europe. Both sides would book revenue. But because Global Crossing was getting less revenue, 360networks tentatively agreed that on a subsequent deal it would spend more with Global Crossing, according to an e-mail written by a Global Crossing executive.

Less than a year before, the companies had signed a $180 million swaps agreement over late-night pizza. This time around, the dealmaking was not so relaxed. "There was a subtext of desperation," says a person who attended the two-day session. The rationale for the deal, he says was "to make sure you met your numbers." The companies, he says, were essentially working backward -- with a revenue figure in mind first.

Global Crossing worried that 360networks soon would file for bankruptcy-court protection. Simpson Thacher told Global Crossing, its client, that if that happened, a judge might deny the company its ownership rights to the capacity it was trying to secure.

Over the phone from the West Coast, 360 CEO Greg Maffei encouraged his New York team to close the deal, despite Global Crossing's concerns, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesperson for 360 declined to comment. The company recently emerged from bankruptcy-court protection.

But Global Crossing also had an incentive to go forward. If the deal didn't close, the company would not be able to meet the projections it made to Wall Street. In a conference call the day before the quarter ended, the executive committee of Global Crossing's board approved the deal.

In an e-mail exchange about a month later, Global Crossing executives discussed whether the company and 360 should swap back the same capacity they had just sold each other. That never happened. And neither company ever used any of the capacity, according to filings in Global Crossing's bankruptcy. The company declined to comment but has said in the past that all its swaps had clear business purposes.

Accounting Follies

Back in the old days, say seven years ago, the asset exchanges Global Crossing was pursuing would have produced nary a blip on the company's financials. The exchanges of assets would have essentially canceled each other out.

But by 2000, Global Crossing had embraced a new accounting treatment for swaps that allowed it to book what it sold as revenue. Moreover, it booked what it bought as a capital expense, which doesn't show up in the operating results scrutinized by telecom analysts. The trick was to make sure that the two companies exchanged separate cash payments for each transaction.

The arrangement was the brainchild of Arthur Andersen's Professional Standards Group, developed in response to a flood of questions from telecoms. "They were much more operations- and marketing-focused than accounting-focused,'' recalls an Andersen official. "They needed help."

Arthur Andersen accountants began advising clients to employ the new treatment by late 2000. Several months later it was included in an update of an Andersen white paper on telecom issues that was written in such dense accounting jargon that a member of Qwest's audit committee wrote in an e-mail, "I highly recommend it as a sedative."

Nevertheless, it became a must-read in the telecom world. Eager to attract new clients, Andersen began making presentations explaining its accounting interpretation to telecoms. "They had this product. It almost was a cookbook recipe," says an attorney who sat in on Andersen's hourlong Powerpoint presentation. Andersen spokesman Patrick Dorton calls that characterization incorrect and says it reflects a "lack of understanding about subjective accounting standards."

Some Andersen officials were wary about the white paper. The Andersen team auditing Qwest wrote eight reports to the company's chief financial officer and audit committee between 2000 and 2002 that among other things detailed the team members' worries about the accounting treatment of swaps. In a presentation to Qwest's audit committee on Oct. 24, 2001, the Andersen auditors described Qwest's swap accounting as "maximum risk," according to minutes of the meeting. Still, the auditors and the company's management signed off on Qwest's financial statements for 2000 and 2001.

Mr. Dorton, the Andersen spokesman, says the auditors' advice was "entirely consistent with the white paper." He added that because Qwest was founded as a construction company specializing in laying fiber, and not strictly a telecom, only portions of the paper were relevant.

Andersen officials say their firm was issuing opinions at a time when there was no real guidance from accounting-standards groups or the SEC on telecom accounting. In August the SEC finally barred telecom swaps that create revenue.

Feeding the Dot-Com Frenzy

For revenue-hungry dot-coms, boosting financials through round-trip deals was common. For a while it was even legal. The commodity most often traded back and forth was online advertisements. Many companies swapped the ads and booked revenue on the deals even though not a penny changed hands.

When iVillage Inc., a Web site aimed at women, went public in 1999, it disclosed that 20% of its revenue came from round-trip trades of advertising. That year, 8% of Yahoo Inc.'s revenue came from advertising trades.

But by year's end, it became harder for Internet start-ups to use round-trip deals to generate revenue. That's because the Financial Accounting Standards Board got wind of the practice and issued tough guidelines. It warned that booking advertising-swap deals as revenue "may lead to overstated revenues and artificially inflated market capitalization.'' Henceforth it had to be disclosed as "barter revenues."

That didn't deter Homestore Inc. executive vice president Peter Tafeen from searching for ways to make round-trips work. Known within the company as "the Piranha," Mr. Tafeen began hunting for solutions with Eric Keller, an America Online executive, says a person familiar with the federal criminal investigation of Homestore, an online real-estate company. The California State Teachers' Retirement System has sued Homestore, AOL and Mr. Tafeen in federal court in Los Angeles.

According to that civil suit, Mr. Tafeen in March 2001 outlined his plans to Homestore's chief financial officer, who has since pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Mr. Tafeen told the official that he and Mr. Keller had plans for triangular deals that would help make up for a projected $15 million shortfall in the company's quarterly revenue goal, according to the suit. Mr. Tafeen allegedly said that the deals would be structured so that auditors would not discover their true nature.

Lawyers familiar with the criminal probe say that the two men used tiny software companies as cash conduits between the two larger companies. Typically in these deals, Homestore would buy products from a third company, which would then buy ads on America Online, according to those lawyers. America Online would share the revenue with Homestore. Prosecutors are scrutinizing 16 transactions involving America Online and Homestore, the lawyers say.

Mr. Keller has been fired from America Online and did not return phone calls. Robert Charles Friese, a lawyer for Mr. Tafeen, said transactions his client worked on had legitimate business purposes. Homestore and AOL declined to comment.

FinanCenter Inc., a small firm in Tucson, Ariz., had pitched its software to Homestore in late 1999 without success. Two years later, it got a call from Homestore vice president Bruce Cornelius.

At first, Homestore expressed interest in licensing FinanCenter's Web-based financial planning software. But in June, Mr. Cornelius, who has left Homestore, began pushing the smaller company to enter into an unusual arrangement, according to former FinanCenter executives.

Homestore wanted to pay $3.75 million for software valued at only $750,000. Then it wanted FinanCenter to spend $3 million buying ads on AOL, according to the former FinanCenter executives. Mr. Cornelius declined to comment.

Darryl Reed, then a FinanCenter vice president, says he wasn't completely against the America Online twist, but he wanted it in the contract and the money placed in escrow. Homestore balked.

"It was odd that the money was passing through us,'' says Andria Poe, a former FinanCenter manager, who at one point opened the company's office for a 3 a.m. meeting during a week of frenzied negotiations.

The FinanCenter team worried that the company might be on the hook for a $3.75 million refund, so Homestore promised to put liability limits into the contract. But Ms. Poe rejected that, fearing that the clauses wouldn't stand up in court. She was also put off by Homestore's desire to backdate the contract.

Finally, FinanCenter president e-mailed Homestore. "The truth be known we'd prefer to just license you the tools for the $750k that we had originally planned," he wrote. Homestore didn't respond and FinanCenter walked away from the deal.

Other small companies accepted similar proposals from Homestore, including PurchasePro.com Inc. and Classmates Online Inc., according to the civil suit. A Classmates spokesman says his company's transactions with Homestore were valid from its perspective. PurchasePro.com declined to comment.

Round-trip deals allowed Homestore to inflate revenue by $46 million in 2001, according to prosecutors. Homestore has restated a total of $164.4 million of revenue for 2000 and 2001. In September, three former executives pleaded guilty to accounting fraud and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Keeping Up With Enron

With Enron so far ahead of the pack, many of its energy-trading competitors were eager to find ways to catch up. For some, round-trip trades were the answer. They simply traded equal amounts of natural gas or electricity at the same time, for the same price. Then they cited the artificially boosted trading volumes and revenue in press releases and prospectuses touting their trading businesses.

For CMS Energy, a relatively small trader, increasing volume was central to its goal of building the reputation of its trading floor. At the end of 2001, Power Markets Week, a trade publication, ranked CMS Energy 21st in terms of power sales in North America, still way behind top-ranked Enron.

But most of CMS Energy's trades of 148.2 million megawatt hours of power during 2000 and 2001 weren't real. The company made $5.2 billion of meaningless swap transactions.

Wash trades proliferated in the energy business because the new wholesale energy markets are largely unregulated. Commodity exchanges have rules barring the deals, but they don't apply on off-exchange or over-the-counter energy markets. After lobbying by energy companies such as Enron, legislation passed in 2000 exempted from oversight most trading in over-the-counter energy markets. Federal energy and financial regulators have jurisdiction in some cases of wrongdoing and are probing wash trades.

In May, Reliant Resources Inc. disclosed that about $6.4 billion in trades executed between 1999 and 2001 were wash transactions. Duke Energy Corp. in August disclosed that it had conducted 89 wash trades, amounting to $217 million in revenue, in 2001 and 2002.

It turned out that 28 of those trades were executed on a little watched online energy market, the IntercontinentalExchange. ICE, as it is known, was founded in 2000, but it suddenly became more popular with energy traders after the collapse of Enron and its online exchange last year. Based in Atlanta, ICE is owned by 13 primary shareholders that include Duke, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and BP PLC.

For owners, there was an incentive to boost volumes on the exchange. People familiar with ICE agreements say that companies could earn equity by pledging to conduct a set volume of trades on the exchange, and that energy-trading owners could boost their stake by increasing volume. Volume statistics also were heavily used in ICE's marketing efforts.

Duke last summer fired two employees after an internal review of its wash trades and has reorganized its trading operations. A spokeswoman said Duke encouraged traders to use ICE but didn't condone wash trades. She said that Duke's equity stake wasn't affected by the wash trades.

A shareholders suit filed last month in Houston against El Paso Corp., another ICE owner, alleges that executives offered a monthly bonus of $10,000 to the trader who executed the most deals on ICE. The suit, citing El Paso trading logs, lists six wash trades that El Paso allegedly conducted on ICE. A spokesman says El Paso didn't make wash trades.

An ICE spokesman said that ICE has implemented procedures to weed out wash trades and believes they made up a small percentage of volume.

Still, some of those trades have gotten through. On Sept. 21, 2001, ICE sponsored a fund-raiser, in which a day's commissions would go to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. About $1 million was raised.

But some of the volume was phony. Traders for American Electric Power Co., an ICE co-owner, executed three sets of wash trades with El Paso and Aquila Inc. on ICE that day, according to filings the company made with regulators. An AEP spokesman said the trades were made without top managers' approval.

Write to Dennis K. Berman at dennis.berman@wsj.com5, Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com6 and Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com7

Updated December 23, 2002

 

 

 


Special Pages On The Various of Web Sites Authored by Karl Loren
OC History Oral Chelation Testimonials
Family Of Three Oral Chelation Formulas Life Glow Basic Life Glow Basic Ingredient List
Life Glow Plus Life Glow Plus
Ingredient List
American Heart Association -- Lies
Super Life Glow Super Life Glow
 Ingredient List
FAQ
All Products Shopping Cart Order Section Research
Taheebo Life Tea Witch Doctors Versus Harvard MSM Sulfur
Calcium How Bones Grow Colloidal Minerals
Jean Ross Philosophy The Wednesday Letter
Arthritis & James Coburn's Use Of MSM Karl Loren Viewpoints News And Announcements
Dr. Flanagan's Microhydrin 500 Page Book On Heart Disease Colostrum & Transfer Factor
Germanium Ultrasound Technology Bulk MSM
Cancer & Biopsy Diabetes Heart Disease & Bypass Surgery
Karl Loren's Diet Guarantee Navigation Help Page
The Links Below Jump To Pages On Whatever Web You Are In
Table Of Contents Search This Web Navigation Help Page
Write To Karl Loren -- He Pledges To Answer EVERY Personal Message, Personally.  Click here or on his name in the box below.
The Links Below Are To Various Web Sites Published By Karl Loren
Karl Loren Web Vibrant Life Web Karl Loren's Book
Super Colostrum Bulk MSM Heart Disease
Emmessar Happiness Arthritis
Instead Of Chelation Therapy Super Colostrum (2)
Immune Egg Central Page For All Web Sites!
 

I promise to answer your message -- click here to send me a personal message

Dear Karl,                                        

 

 

 

SUBSCRIBE:  The Wednesday Letter is a free electronic monthly newsletter written and published by Karl Loren.  You can view more than 50 back issues of this publication by clicking here.  The Wednesday Letter subscription list is maintained on a secure server, no name is ever given or sold to anyone, and it is never used except for this Newsletter.  It is automatically published on the Tuesday night just before the first Wednesday of every month.  You can subscribe to this free monthly electronic letter by entering your eMail address and name below.  You will then automatically receive a request for confirmation, sent to whatever address you have entered.  If you do NOT receive this confirmation request, then you will not be subscribed.  There may have been an error with your address and you should resubmit.  The letter is never sent twice to the same address -- so you do not have to worry about a duplicate subscription.  When you receive this confirmation request you must reply to it, or your subscription will not become active.  No one can subscribe your name, and address, without you being notified, and if you get an unwanted notice of subscription you only need to DO NOTHING and the subscription will NOT be active.

E-Mail Address:
First Name:
Last Name:

REMOVAL:  You can remove yourself from the subscription list in several different ways.  Click here to read about this entire newsletter system.  Every edition of The Wednesday Letter is delivered to your address with YOUR name and address in view on the letter, with a link that allows you to remove THAT name from the subscription list.  If you try to send this removal message from an address different from the one you used to send in your original confirmation, then you will get a warning notice first, sent to the subscription address, asking you to confirm that you want to be removed from the list -- by replying to THAT request for confirmation, you will then be automatically removed.  Thus, no one else can unsubscribe you, from some other computer, without your knowledge.  But, if you send in the unsubscribe notice from the same machine used to receive the Letter, then the removal from the subscription list is automatic.

E-Mail Address:

Personal Message:  When you send a personal message to Karl Loren, you will receive a personal reply as per his instructions.  Karl pledges that every personal message will get a personal answer. When you provide your mail address, we will send you free information including our free catalog and a cassette tape lecture by Karl Loren about heart disease, no charge, by mail, even if outside the US.  You can select particular information you would like to receive, along with the free cassette tape and catalog.

You can reach Vibrant Life in many ways, including by mail to Vibrant Life, 2808 N. Naomi St., Burbank, CA 91504.  Within the US and Canada, use the toll free number:  (800) 523-4521, the local number:  (818) 558-1799, the FAX:  (818) 558-7299, eMail to kimberly@oralchelation.com or any one of the hundreds of message forms throughout the 50 web sites.  Vibrant Life normally ships the same day we get an order.  There are message forms on each of the 100,000+ pages on this and other sites where you can communicate with Vibrant Life.  Check out our companion site, at:  http://www.oralchelation.net where Karl's 2000 page book is published.  Karl Loren is the author and webmaster for this BOOK, as well as for another web site about ORAL CHELATION.  His personal philosophical articles are at PHILOSOPHY

Copyright © April 25, 2008 2:38 AM by Karl Loren on behalf of Vibrant Life, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  Permission is granted for non-commercial downloading, copying, distribution or redistribution on two conditions:  One, that some form of copyright notice is included in every copy distributed or copied, showing the copyright belonging to Vibrant Life, Burbank, CA, at www.oralchelation.com . The second condition is that the material is not to be used for any purpose contrary to the purposes and objectives of this site.  This permission does not extend to materials on this site which are copyrighted by others.