Don’t you love it when wealthy, grown men get upset with each other over basketball?
In this corner, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. And in the other corner, L.A. Lakers’ coach, Phil Jackson.
I think Jackson needs to start his own blog. ;^)
In addition to maintaining the Wall Street Journal’s essential Law Blog, Peter Lattman continues to contribute interesting news articles for the WSJ, including this one from yesterday that he co-authored with Jesse Eisinger about something that is close to the heart of the Enron scandal — a company’s alleged use of special purpose entities to dump low-performing assets that would otherwise depress earnings if the company were to hold on to them (thus, the characterization of an SPE as a “nuclear waste dump”).
Public revelations of former Enron CFO Andy Fastow’s shenanigans with certain of Enron’s SPE’s in October, 2001 triggered the collapse of Enron into bankruptcy, and the same thing almost happened to Omnicon — the world’s largest ad holding company — back in June 2002. At that time, the WSJ reported that an Omnicon SPE called Seneca Investments appeared to have been used by Omnicom to avoid an earnings charge of about $90 million in connection with its reporting of $246 million of earnings for the first half of 2001. Given the nearness of similar disclosures relating to Enron and Enron’s subsequent December, 2001 bankruptcy, Omnicom’s stock price dropped like a rock before stabilizing at about half of its pre-SPE disclosure price. Nevertheless, the company was able to stem an Enronesque collapse into bankruptcy.