"The not-so-secret dirty secret of the crash is that even as investors were losing 70%, 90%, even in some cases all of their holdings, top officials of many of the companies that have crashed the hardest were getting immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy. They got rich because they were able to take advantage of the bubble to cash in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock--stock that was usually handed to them via risk-free options--at vastly inflated prices. When the bubble burst, their shareholders were left holding the bag. But, hey, they had theirs...
First, we looked at companies that had hit a market cap of at least $400 million--and fallen by at least 75% from the highs they reached during the bubble years. Second, we counted insider stock sales from 1999 onward. (That's why Gary Winnick's tally comes to "only" $508 million on our list; he had sold a ton of Global Crossing stock before 1999.) And third, we included only stock sold by top executives and board members; the quick profits made by the venture capital firms that funded the dot-com boom were excluded. (Also excluded in all but a very few cases--largely because it's impossible to track--was stock sold by company officers after they left their jobs. For the same reason, we did not include the cost of acquiring the shares; in most cases option prices were so low that including that cost would hardly affect the totals.) What we cared about, ultimately, was a simple, straightforward thing: How much cash did the top executives at America's Losingest Companies reap by selling their shares to the investing public?"
Full story and list of suspects at: http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209015
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 AIM: KDean75206 Buffalo Activist Network http://www.buffaloactivist.net http://www.yaysoft.com
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