SCOTT SULLIVAN, the former chief financial officer at WorldCom, the bankrupt US telecoms group, told a New York court yesterday that Bernie Ebbers, the group’s former chief executive, had put pressure on him to inflate revenues so that the group met Wall Street estimates.
In his second day on the witness stand, Mr Sullivan said: “The source of the pressure was Bernie and the source of the pressure was also the marketplace.”
Mr Sullivan described how his former boss denied his pleas to lower earnings projections as the company’s finances deteriorated in 2000. Mr Sullivan testified that as earnings reports came due “there was one thing that he said each time, ‘We have to hit our numbers’ ”.
Mr Sullivan told the court that, under pressure from his boss, he adjusted revenue figures, such as credits for overbilling, in order to match Wall Street analysts’ growth expectations.
Full Story @ Times Online
I can confirm the following from the article "Mr Sullivan described how his boss was obsessed with costs, accusing employees of stealing coffee. Mr Sullivan paraphrased his former boss: “There’s more coffee filters than coffee bags. That means employees are taking coffee home, and we need to cut out the service.”
We lost our coffee and were told that it was to cust expenses... then it came out that Ebbers thought we were stealing coffee. Nobody bothered to consider we used 2x packs of coffee for each pot because it was weak, poor quality coffee to begin with. :-/
Posted by Muddy at February 9, 2005 07:31 AM | TrackBack"I can confirm....his boss was obsessed with costs, accusing employees of stealing coffee."
OMG!! I remember you telling me about that!
Of couse, my favorite one is where back in August (I believe) of 2001, Ebbers layed of something like hundereds of employees to save a butt load of money suppossedly for the good of the company. A couple of months later, he bought a yacht for the exact same amount of money that he clamed he was trying to save the company by laying off all those people.
I hope he enjoyed all that wind in his face from those little joy rides while people were pounding the pavement looking for another job so their families could eat again. What a jerk!
Posted by: mrs. muddy at February 9, 2005 08:25 AMHmm.. I think it was more like a few thousand people laid off. And...
It was a week or two not months if I remember correctly.
Then again my memories of that place might be repressed. :-(
You're right, it was *thousands* and not hundereds. That was actually a typo on my part. Maybe it *was* 2 weeks....you'd remember better than I considering *you* were actually employeed there and not me.
"Then again my memories of that place might be repressed. :-("
LOL....I don't blame you for that.:-P
Posted by: mrs. muddy at February 9, 2005 10:06 AMYou know, it all sounds like a cop out. It's like saying "The devil made me do it."
No one MADE you do anything, you made a conscious choice and you could have blown the whistle then and there and saved alot of people a lot of heartache.
Posted by: skywalker at February 9, 2005 06:25 PM