Former Hewlett-Packard vice president Atul Malhotra has been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly passing a confidential email from his previous employer, IBM Corp., to senior H-P executives. According to an indictment filed June 27 in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., Atul Malhotra was the director of sales and business development for IBM’s printing-services division in March of 2006. That’s when he requested confidential pricing information about IBM services. Mr. Malhotra became a vice president of H-P’s printing division in May of that same year.
That July, the indictment alleges, he “sent an e-mail to an H-P senior vice president with the subject ‘for your eyes only’” with an attachment including the confidential information. He allegedly followed it up with a similar email to a second senior vice president.
This week New York businessman Jacob Arabo (Born Yakov Arabov) and known in the hip-hop world as “Jacob the Jeweler” was sentenced to 30 months in prison for lying to investigators looking into a multistate drug ring. In October Arabo pleaded guilty to falsifying records and giving false statements as part of a deal with federal prosecutors. U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn was asked to impose a minimum sentence of three years and one month. However Cohn decided to reduce the sentence by seven months, citing Arabo’s extensive charity work. Judge Cohn also ordered the Russian immigrant to pay a $50,000 fine and to make a $2 million forfeiture payment to the government.Arabo was arrested in 2006 at his
There is buzz throughout the technology and media world that Apple CEO Jobs’ health is failing. Many say that Jobs didn’t look well onstage during the introduction of the new 3G iPhone at the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference. They say the already slim and trim Jobs looked even thinner than usual…almost crack head like.
SF Gate Columnist Mark Morford wrote that Jobs’ trademark denim jeans were riding a little too high and the even more trademark black mock turtleneck looked a size or two too large. All of which caused the rabid Mac blogosphere and even the cold-hearted suits over at Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, et al, to frumple and frown and wonder about Steve Jobs’ potential ill health. Read More.
According the New York Times, Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo started a plan to sell tons of stock over a period just before the sub-prime markets tanked. In fact Mozilo twice raised the number of shares that could be sold: once in December 2006, when Countrywide stock was $40.50, then again in February, when it hit a high of $45.03.
Over the course of that time Mozilo made hundreds of millions from the stock sales while his company and the rest of the mortgage industry saw one of the biggest declines in history.
Of course, Mozillo didn’t have a crystal ball. I mean he didn’t know that the market was going to tank the way it did. But what he did know is that an unprecedented number of Americans were buying houses…many of whom were financing their purchases using risky interest-only and variable rate loans in order to afford them.
Now that the market is in a steep decline, Mozilo has made his millions but has also announced that he plans to lay off over 12,000 Countrywide workers.
So the question becomes, how do you classify what Mozilo did? With hindsight as our guide, was he a sell-out? Or was he a genius to have the foresight to employ smart investment strategy and see huge personal gains?
Well the treasurer of North Carolina has written the head of the SEC and asked the agency to look into the sales. “As an investor and a Countrywide shareholder, I was shocked to learn that C.E.O. Angelo Mozilo apparently manipulated his trading plans to cash in, just as the sub-prime crisis was heating up and Countrywide’s fortunes were cooling off,” Mr. Moore wrote.
How do you feel about Angelo’s move?
News Corp. has hired former HP CEO Carly Fiorina to be a contributor to its new Fox Business Network, due to launch next week.
Fiorina could become the next Maria Bartiromo (Anchor for CNBC) or Katie Couric (CBS). Fox did not say how often Miss Fiorina would be contrbuting, but the former HP Exec is considered to be charismatic, engaging, extremely intelligent and good-looking by the business community. That combination could make her the next household name in news.
The thing that stands out among the successful female network news anchors is that they each have sex appeal which helps draw in their predominately male viewing audiences. Fiorina definitely brings that quality to the table.
“I am pleased to have the opportunity to continue to speak out on issues of vital concern to our economy and our nation,” Fiorina said in a written statement.
The question is, how will she stand up to the two Queens of Network and Business News?
Yesterday the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a half-percentage point. This was the first rate cut in the past four years. Toll Brothers CEO Robert Toll said the rate cut may signal that the economy is worse than previously thought and likely doesn’t indicate the U.S. housing market has hit bottom.
“I would have done a quarter instead of a half because it signals we’re in deep doodoo,” said Toll, speaking at the Credit Suisse Homebuilder Conference. He went on to say that the current housing market downturn is worse than the ones we saw between 1980 and 1982 and between 1987 and 1991.
Toll Brothers is the nation’s leading builder of new luxury homes, new home construction, golf communities, retirement communities, resort homes and other high end real estate development. Read.
