Bill Cosby says you can't prove George Zimmerman is a racist

"Let me just tell you this man," Cosby said. "See this racial stuff goes into a whole bunch of discussion which has stuff that you can't prove. You can't prove that somebody is a racist unless they come out and do the act that is found to be that."

Important lessons from the Nortel trial

On Jan. 14, 2013, nearly nine years after the claimed fraud was alleged to have occurred, Ontario Superior Court Judge Frank Marrocco dismissed all charges against former Nortel Networks Corporation chief executive Frank Dunn as well as former chief financial officer Douglas Beatty and former controller Michael Gollogly.

All three executives were accused of defrauding Nortel and the public by deliberately misrepresenting Nortel’s financial results between 2001 and 2004, in order to maximize corporate bonuses due to them. The demise of Nortel — a telecom giant — is complex and the context of the telecommunications industry at that time is important to a deeper and more penetrating understanding of what went wrong.

More on this item from Terrence Corcoran at the Financial Post

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

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford wins libel trial - judge finds plaintiff to be a fraudster and liar

Ford was sued by over a Toronto Sun interview in which he said an untendered contract awarded to Tuggs Inc for a concession at the city`s boardwalk smacks of corruption.

Tuggs owner George Foulidis sued Ford for libel and the case was dismissed on interesting grounds. Evidently, George Foulidis was not listed as a senior officer of Tugs Inc when Ford`s interview took place. George Foulidis`brother Konstantinos was the one who was listed as the president, secretary and treasurer. Therefore no reasonable person would have taken Ford`s comments about Tuggs to refer to George Foulidis.


The judge also noted that the plaintiff, George Foulidis was a fraudster and a liar.

Which would give him something in common with lots of people out to get Rob Ford.

You can read the judgement here

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's good day in court

The defamation suit being fought by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is taking some interesting twists and turns. The owner of a cafe with an exclusive, untendered, long-term lease awarded to him by a majority of City Council claimed he was being maligned by Ford's comments about the corruption behind the deal.

It turns out that it appears there were indeed some dodgy goings-on with the appearance of some very unsavory dealings.

To the dismay of the enemies of the only Mayor to bring in a budget that reduced spending in Toronto's history, there is a good chance Ford will emerge from his trial completely vindicated.

Lengthy, expensive Nortel fraud trial comes to a close amid a flopped prosecution

Judge Frank Marrocco rarely put counsel on the spot during the five month long Nortel fraud trail and did so ever-so-gently yesterday with a simple question to lead Crown attorney Robert Hubbard. But during the Crown`s closing arguments on Thursday, the judge asked whether, in a company that did ten billion dollars in annual business,  a few million dollars in misstated accruals, an amount that represented one tenth of one percent of revenues, could not be the result of errors rather than a planned deception.

That question left Crown attorney Hubbard at a loss for an answer, leaving him to mumble that his junior colleague, who also appeared caught off-guard, would address that aspect the next day. This is a trial that has cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and was based on the fact that one of Canada`s largest companies went bust and thousands of investors lost millions upon millions. With all that pain, it was felt someone should be punished, but the Crown picked the wrong people and had no evidence against them.

There had not been a single shred of evidence to suggest that the three accused, former CEO Frank Dunn, Chief Financial Officer Doug Beatty, and Controller Michael Gollogly in any way deceived Nortel`s auditing firm Delloite or Nortel`s shareholders about any of their actions.

If a fraud was perpetrated, the way The Toronto Star reported what was said, the Crown`s argument is that it was perpetrated by telepathy, `The accused in the long-running Nortel Networks Corp. fraud trial didn’t need to tell underlings to falsify accounting entries to trigger return to profit bonus payouts in 2003, the Crown alleged in its closing arguments Thursday “Everybody just knew what to do,” lead counsel Robert Hubbard said.

The irony is that after billions of dollars of bad investments by the previous team of senior executives that had been approved by the board, Nortel`s subsequent leadership, who are now on trial,  had the company turned around after the largest ever restructuring of a Canadian company. The workforce was reduced by two-thirds, about 60,000 employees, and the company was on the verge of returning to profitability. But after a financial restatement had to be issued,  a frequent occurrence among major companies, the Board hired a forensic audit team to review Nortel.`s accounting practices After a brief investigation, which was not nearly long enough to examine the massive number of transactions involved, one of the forensic auditors, who was contradicted by members of his own team, said there were improprieties. Rather than conducting a more thorough investigation, Nortel`s board immediately went into a panic, suspended Dunn, Beatty and Gollogly, and that led the company into a series of events that caused an unstoppable tailspin.

James Bagnall at The Ottawa Citizen has summed up the matter clearly:

After more than five months of testimony from 17 Crown witnesses, the most puzzling aspect of the Nortel fraud case is that it was brought at all.    

Despite having culled millions of emails from the hard drives of Nortel employees, the Crown could not produce a single instance in which the co-accused — chief executive Frank Dunn, chief financial officer Douglas Beatty or controller Michael Gollogly — instructed anyone to do anything illegal. No gun. No smoke.   

Nor has the Crown been able to explain behaviour that suggested fraud was far from the thoughts of the accused. They designed a return-to-profitability plan that deliberately would not trigger payments until multiple conditions had been met over a full year. Nortel rival Lucent Technologies paid its employees a bonus simply for staying with the firm.    

When Nortel’s board convinced Dunn in 2004 to replace his chief financial officer, he hired Bill Kerr — a former Nortel CFO who knew more about the company’s accounting than nearly any other outsider he could have picked. Douglas Beatty, the executive Kerr replaced, refused to cut his staff of internal auditors, even though Nortel shrank by two-thirds.  

The Crown’s theory of the crime — that Dunn and his colleagues orchestrated a global conspiracy under the nose of Nortel’s longtime auditor, Deloitte — was difficult enough to accept as a starting point. But in the past few months, one witness after another testified about the wide open debate between auditors and Nortel managers over the proper accounting treatment for dozens of key entries in 2002 and 2003.  

The Defense will make its closing arguments next week. But based on the lack of substance the Crown offered, this trial which has destroyed the careers of three innocent men, and which appears to have only been brought for the purpose of appeasing public anger, cannot end soon enough.

Closing arguments in the Nortel Trial

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the accounting fraud trial involving Nortel’s three most senior financial executives is this: it’s that the defence has insisted on the most disclosure of evidence, not the Crown. So it was Friday evening, when lawyers for the three defendants — Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly — submitted their closing written arguments to Ontario Superior Court judge Frank Marrocco.

Some 500 pages of trial analysis from the defendants became available Monday, easily topping the 210 page final statement from the Crown, which was presented to the judge Aug. 3.

It can be reduced to this line: “There’s not a shred of evidence of any overt acts of concealment by the accused with respect to their accounting practices,” the argument notes. 

Jim Bagnall  has done an excellent job following this trial. Read more HERE

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant tries to come back from a wreck

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryan's story is a tragedy of remarkable proportions. A evening out with his wife ended with the mangled body of a deeply disturbed bicycle courier on the street of Toronto after a haywire attempt by Bryant to shake the infuriated former mental patient from his convertible. That night was also seemingly the end of what was considered one of the most promising political careers in Canada.

I've met Bryant and his wife a few times. He was my Member of Provincial Parliament, and his wife Susan was a colleague of a very good friend of mine at a law firm. They are both decent, intelligent people.

The tragedy that affected the families of the politician and the courier were unexpected for the former and almost inevitable for the latter. Darcy Allan Sheppard had a history of mental illness from the time he was a child. He had serious addiction problems and earlier in the night he was killed, Sheppard's girlfriend called the police because he had threatened her while he was drunk and belligerent.

There are some people who are upset because tthey think Bryant got an advantageous deal in not having to face trial. It strains credulity to imagine that he did not get preferential treatment because of his connections, influence, affluence and employment of strategic counsel and public relations.

But on the other hand, when one reads decisions based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a particular phrase comes up over and over: "the administration of justice."

Would it have been likely for Bryant to have been convicted for having killed Sheppard while trying to escape from the enraged, hysterical, intoxicated courier?  Given the evidence that has come out about Sheppard's history of similar violence, it seems that the result of a trial would have seen more than a half a million dollars of public funds spent to end with Bryant's exoneration.

Bryant has just published a memoir detailing the incident. It may be the beginning of a successful process of him trying to rehabilitate his public image. Or enough people people may have made up their minds about him to confound that hope.

Is it fair? What is unfair is that everyone in a similar situation doesn't have the access to the same resources and privileges as Michael Bryant. But that's life. However, despite the tragedy of Sheppard's death and Bryant and his family's unalterable trauma, justice appears to have been done.

An interesting interview with Bryant on CBC here


These photos of Darcy Allan Sheppard attacking a car in a similar way to the one he had attacked Bryan's were instrumental in the decision not to take his case to trial.

Nortel Show Trial Update: Prosecution witness says Chinese hackers contributed to Nortel downfall

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Computer hacking - not the bursting of the dot-com bubble or a later financial scandal - may have been the driving force behind the spectacular fall of former Canadian tech darling Nortel Networks Corp., a cyber-security expert says.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that hackers from China had breached Nortel's corporate network as far back as 2000, and maintained access to various information for at least 10 years.

That kind of hacking, said David Skillicorn of Queen's University in Ontario, may have been just as responsible, if not more, for the Nortel collapse than the dot-com bubble or the scandal that has landed three former company executives facing trial for fraud.


And in further news, yet another Crown witness does more to prove the defense's position that fraud charges are "preposterous." The Globe and Mail reports:

In earlier questioning by Crown attorney Robert Hubbard, Ms. Sledge said she felt employees were rushed to meet an October deadline to publicly disclose the company’s third-quarter financial results and the broad scope of the restatement. The restatement details were finalized in December, 2003, but Nortel announced two months later that it needed to do a second, broader restatement, which was ultimately unveiled in January, 2005.

Mr. Porter suggested the company was obliged to act quickly on the restatement in 2003 to minimize harm to investors.

“You understand it was potentially harmful to Nortel and its shareholders for quarterly statement for Q3, 2003, to be delayed and not available to the public,” he asked Ms. Sledge.

She replied that she knew it was.

Prediction: In the not-distant future, the defense moves for a summary dismissal of charges based on the prosecution not having established in any way that a crime was committed and to spare the taxpayers more wasted money and court time pursuing charges the prosecutor doesn't appear to understand...and they get a ruling in their favour.

The Nortel Show Trial

The largest fraud trial in Canadian history is set to being on Monday. Nortel's collapse in 2003 cost billions to shareholders.  It had a major affect on pension funds and thousands of individual investors. Nortel's misfortune was one of the most sudden and extreme falls of an enormous corporation since the Great Depression. Billions were paid out in legal settlements and naturally everyone concerned looked around to find someone to blame.

During the dot com bubble of the early 2000's, Nortel's Board had approved billions of dolars worth of acquisitions of what turned out to be near worthless investments, and it fell to CEO Frank Dunn and CFO Douglas Beatty to try to turn that around. They instituted massive spending cuts that resulted in billions of savings and as far as financial markets were concerned, they were able to effect a miraculous resurrection at Nortel.

The Crown is alleging an extremely complex fraud on the part of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly to manipulate losses and earnings from one quarter to the next in order to meet the conditions for performance bonuses for the senior executives.

However there's no proof that ever happened.

Everything the trio of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly did was approved by the auditing firm Deloitte and fell withing the parameters of normal business practices and reporting. Just days before trial, amid the four million documents the crown has submitted as being relevant without identifying a single one that specifically shows fraud by the defendants, charges of falsifying documents were dropped. The fraud charges remain, but there is much speculation that this is simply a case of the government trying to look like it is doing something in the face of the anger and outrage from the public about a series of events which few people understand.

In today's National Post, James Bagnall provides an excellent summary of the issues:

"The deeper you dig into the accounting history of Nortel, the easier it is to believe that the board of directors, its private investigators and the RCMP just plain got it wrong - that the atmosphere may have been so poisoned by Nortel's spectacular fall from grace that many were simply looking for someone to blame."

It's an important article about a major case that details how, rather than bringing three criminals to justice, the government may be wasting millions more taxpayer dollars on an expensive show trial that will accomplish nothing other than to demonize three innocent men.