Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospetus ($) observed the following regarding the Stros’ sweep of the Cardinals:
The Astros took advantage of the losses by the Cubs and Giants, completing a sweep of the Cardinals to tie those two at 70 defeats. If they run the table this weekend against the Rockies–and they’ve won 15 straight home games–they can do no worse than a tie for the wild-card slot.
What a waste of two-and-a-half years. Someone owes Larry Dierker an apology.
Ouch!
As expected, Houston-based El Paso Corp. disclosed a huge loss for 2003 and restated previous financial results in a delayed Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
El Paso posted a full-year 2003 loss of $1.93 billion, or $3.23 a share, on revenue of $6.7 billion. The loss from continuing operations was $616 million, or $1.03 a share. The company also restated its financial results for every year since 1999 as a result of an investigation into its reserve accounting and accounting for hedging transactions. The overall impact of the restatements was to cut shareholder equity by about $2.4 billion at Sept. 30, 2003. Of this amount, about $1.7 billion related to the restatement of El Paso’s historical reserve estimates and about $700 million related to the restatement of its historical accounting for hedges. Here are the earlier posts on El Paso’s mounting financial problems.
The 10-K also disclosed that one of El Paso’s units has been subpoenaed by a grand jury from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to produce records regarding the United Nations’ Oil for Food Program governing sales of Iraqi oil. The unit, El Paso CGP Company, was formerly Coastal Corp., which the company acquired in January 2001. The former chairman of Coastal — Oscar Wyatt — was an unabashed critic of Operation Desert Storm in the first Persian Gulf War and has been a vocal public critic of El Paso’s management over the past several years.
El Paso also received a subpoena from the SEC earlier this year relating to its reserve revisions, which are also being investigated by the U.S. attorney. Moreover, the company’s hedge accounting is also the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney and may become the subject of a separate inquiry by the SEC.
Man, is El Paso a white collar criminal defense attorney’s dream or what?
Finally, El Paso reported that it expects to meet its November 30 deadline for filing its delayed Form 10-Q’s for the first two quarters of 2004. El Paso remains on my reorganization watch as a likely candidate for a chapter 11 case in the near future, so stay tuned.
After killing his neighbor three years ago and dumping the butchered body into Galveston Bay and then winning an acquittal in his subsequent 2003 murder trial, Robert Durst — an heir to a New York family’s real estate fortune — pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of bail jumping and one of evidence tampering that will allow Durst to get out of prison in less than a year. Here are earlier posts on the Durst case.
The deal came just two hours after state appellate judge Judge Jackson B. Smith Jr. had removed removed Galveston State District Judge Susan Criss from the case. Judge Criss had refused the plea deal earlier in the week, which was yet another strange twist in a case. Judge Criss had been rebuked by the appellate court earlier this year for setting Durst’s bail at $3 billion dollars on the three relatively minor charges after Durst had been acquitted in the murder trial (the appellate court reduced the bail to $450,000). With credit for time served both before and after his murder trial, Durst will likely be freed from prison early next year under state prison system rules.
The recusal came after sheriff’s investigators testified before Judge Smith that Judge Criss had given them information in December that prompted an investigation into possible jury tampering during Durst’s murder trial. Although the investigators found no evidence of criminal activity by jurors or anyone involved in the trial, they did secretly tape-record conversations between Durst and a juror who visited him in jail after the trial. Nevertheless, Durst did admit in the taped conversation that he skipped a court appearance after he posted a $300,000 bond in the murder case in September 2001.
As a result, Durst’s defense attorneys Dick DeGuerin and Mike Ramsey maintained that Judge Criss’ involvement in the jury tampering investigation that led to Durst’s taped admission made her a potential witness in Durst’s bail-jumping case, and that such involvement required her to be removed from adjudicating the case. When Judge Criss refused to recuse herself from the case earlier this week, Judge Smith did so in about 10 minutes on Wednesday.