Nortel Fraud Trial Verdict due today

Three men accused of perpetrating the largest fraud in Canadian Securities history are anxiously awaiting to hear whether Judge Frank Marrocco will decide that their lives and reputations are ruined or if they are the victims of a politicized and inept prosecution case.

The judge will most likely not frame the case in those terms, but over the course of a lengthy, expensive trail, the prosecution has not offered a shred of actual evidence that former Nortel executives Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly conspired to commit fraud. Indeed, a great deal of evidence was offered by the defense to establish that everything the defendants did at Nortel was disclosed to and had the approval of the firm's auditors, Delloite and Touche.

The RCMP unit that gathered the evidence for the Nortel case is feeling apprehension about the outcome, as the only major conviction the ever secured was the slam-dunk Drabinsky fraud trial. The apparent reason for Nortel's ills was the legal, if stupid spending spree on ultimately near-worthless dot-com investments that the Board made before the executives on trail headed the company. The Nortel collapse was the biggest financial tumble in Canada, and will billions lost to investors, there was enormous pressure to find scapegoats and the Board was hardly likely to offer themselves up.

The Ottawa Citizen's James Bagnall is at the University Avenue courthouse this morning and will be live tweeting updates. The Globe and Mail has a crew live tweeting too.

UPDATE: THE VERDICT IS IN:

NOT GUILTY!

Just as Eye on a Crazy Planet has been predicting for the last year