This Chronicle article reports that former Enron treasurer Ben Glisan, the right hand man of former CFO Andrew Fastow and the only former Enron executive who is presently serving prison time, has been testifying before the Enron grand jury in Houston over the past several days. Speculation is rampant that the grand jury is preparing to indict former Enron Chairman and CEO, Ken Lay.
Michael Dell, 40. announced that he will be stepping down later this year as CEO of Round Rock-based Dell, Inc. . Kevin Rollins, Mr. Dell’s longtime partner in running Dell Inc., will take over as CEO of the computer company in mid-July while Mr. Dell will remain chairman of the board. This new arrangement is similar to the one that Microsoft Corp adopted in 2000, when Bill Gates became chairman and chief software architect and Steve Ballmer took over as CEO. Mr. Dell founded Dell in May 1984 when he was a 19-year-old just finishing his freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin. When the company went public four years later, Mr. Dell kept the titles of chairman and CEO.
This NY Times article floats the proposition that Barry Bonds and other alleged customers of accused steroid dispensing BALCO were unwitting consumers of steroids.
H’mm.
Meanwhile, this Reason Online piece addresses the issues in the medical community regarding steroid use.
The NY Times reports here today that the Dallas-based law firm Jenkens & Gilchrist is the subject of a Justice Department motion in federal court that seeks to require the firm to disclose the identities of its clients who were sold abusive tax shelters. The government is contending that Jenkens & Gilchrist participated in fraud and should not be allowed to hide the identities of its tax-shelter clients from the Internal Revenue Service. The so-called crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege is most often applied to lawyers who represent organized-crime families and drug rings suspected of racketeering, not to tax lawyers suspected of civil or criminal tax fraud. The I.R.S. issued 25 summonses for the names of Jenkens & Gilchrist clients and other information, the firm refused to comply with any of the summons, and now the Justice Department is seeking an order to enforce the summons.
As one would expect, the LA Times and the NY Times are all over the Walt Disney Company Board’s decision to remove Michael Eisner as chairman of Disney’s board, although he will remain as CEO for the time being. However, as usual, the Wall Street Journal‘s ($) coverage of the developments here, here and here is far superior.
What is ironic about this development is that it was spurred by Comcast‘s lowball takeover bid for Disney, which Mr. Eisner properly opposes and which has not gone well for Comcast (its stock price is down 10% since the takeover bid was announced). The bottom line is that the Disney board’s failure to develop a succession strategy for top management is coming back to haunt them at a critical time for Disney.
The Texas Heart Institute and the DeBakey Heart Center in Houston’s Texas Medical Center are two of the best cardiovascular surgical care facilities in the world. Yesterday, the Texas Heart Institute announced that the 12th and only living recipient of an experimental, self-contained mechanical heart called the AbioCor replacement heart underwent surgery to implant the device on Feb. 20 at its facility in Houston. The recipient of the AbioCor replacement heart is in critical but stable condition. This is the fifth patient to receive the device at Texas Heart Institute under the care of Dr. O.H. Frazier, chief of cardiopulmonary transplantation and director of surgical research at the Texas Heart Institute and chief of transplant services at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. The AbioCor clinical trial began in July 2001.
In this related Chronicle article, several of Houston’s leading cardiologists discuss the merits of the increasingly popular “off-bump” heart bypass procedure in which the operation is done “off-pump” — i.e., without circulating the blood of the patient through a heart-lung machine. While some Houston doctors believe that the benefits of minimizing a patient’s recovery time are so great that they use the procedure almost exclusively, other surgeons are skeptical about the procedure’s ability to reduce the risk of stroke and other side effects.
Here is a motion filed recently in the Garden Ridge Corporation chapter 11 case that requests the Delaware bankruptcy court to transfer the case to Houston bankrupty court. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for March 17th. Although worth a shot, the motion will probably fail for the reasons discussed in this prior post. Houston attorney Kirk Kennedy filed the motion on behalf of his clients, the Fazio Family. Prior posts about Houston-based Garden Ridge are here, here and here.
In a surprise to no one in the oil and gas industry, Royal Dutch/Shell Group‘s Board fired the company’s two top executives today in the wake of the company’s embarrassing announcement in January that it had significantly overestimated its oil and gas reserves.
As anyone who has ever had to oversee administration of an employer’s health insurance program knows, America’s health care finance system is in crisis. For those interested in the issues involved in this crisis, the Wall Street Journal ($) has put together a special health care finance section that includes links to a series of stories involving the issue of rationing in America’s health care system. The stories include: “Six Prescriptions to Ease Rationing”; “Universal Care Has a Big Price: Patients Wait”; “Longer Dialysis Raises Hopes, but Poses Dilemma”; “Stark Choices at a Texas Hospital”; “Lilly Fuels Debate Over Rationing”; “An Invisible Web of Gatekeepers”; “Health Care’s Big Secret: Rationing Is Here.” This is a great resource for reviewing the problems and issues confronting our health care finance system, and is worth the price of a WSJ subscription alone.
Along these lines, Jack over at TigerHawk posts this instructive blog entry regarding allocation of health care costs.
The Harris County District Attorney‘s major fraud division announced in this story that it is conducting a criminal investigation into the demise of Houston-based Premiere Holdings of Texas, which promoted itself as a high-yield investment fund to prominent Houstonian investors but spiraled into bankuptcy over two years ago amid allegations of Ponzi scheme-type activity. One of the principal owners of Premiere is David Lapin, who is related to prominent Houston attorneys Jack Lapin (father) and Bobby Lapin (brother). Premiere promoted itself as a high-yield investment fund to mainly wealthy and conservative Houstonians. Indeed, Mike Richards, the former conservative talk show host on Houston conservative Christian radio station KSEV, used to promote Premiere as hot investment opportunity on his radio show. The Premiere case involves some of the best attorneys in Houston’s business litigation bar, so the D.A.’s investigation into Premiere could generate some interesting sparks. Stay tuned.