As we await U.S. District Judge Sim Lake’s decision on the re-sentencing of Jamie Olis later this week, this Economist article does an excellent job of summarizing the issues that are at play in determining the all-important market loss issue with regard to Olis re-sentencing.
I particularly enjoyed the last sentence of the article:
“If Judge Lake has been spending the summer getting up to date on economics, perhaps Mr Olis will be out of prison much sooner than he must once have feared.”
Damon Hack of the NY Times reports on the boys’ road trip of the U.S. Ryder Cup team a couple of weeks ago “to bond” before this week’s matches (and to try and figure out why the U.S. has gotten creamed four out of the last five matches). However, as Hack (what a great name for a golf writer!) notes in the article, Houston’s Jack Burke, a former Ryder Cup member and one of Hal Sutton’s assistant captains on the U.S. Ryder Cup that got scorched two years ago, suggested in his recent book Itís Only a Game that the reason the U.S squad is getting beaten so regularly is really quite simple — the U.S. team members have made so much money through the years that they have become soft.
In this GolfforWoman.com article, Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins expands on Burke’s thought in explaining why so many PGA Tour sponsors want Michelle Wie to play in their tournament:
As a sponsor, the tour says, it’s okay if I sell tickets, but my main job is to help 200 guys I’ve never heard of make a lot of money. They need to make all this money so they can live in one of those tract mansions, probably on the water hole of a golf course in a gated community where it’ll be safe to let their urchins run loose and annoy people.
Near as I can tell, they deserve to be rich because they know how to hit a golf ball. Doesn’t matter that they’ve never read a book that didn’t have a cure for the slice in it, and they resist thinking about anything beyond the next Marriott.
David Delainey, former CEO of Enron Energy Services, was sentenced on Monday to 2 and a half year in the pokey in connection with his plea deal in which he pled guilty to insider trading charges and sang like a canary for the prosecution during the criminal trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.
Delainey went over-the-top in his testimony against Lay and Skilling, so the Enron Task Force didn’t oppose a lenient sentence for him. Moreover, Delainey’s counsel requested a probated sentence from US District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, who is generally considered a relatively light sentencing judge. As a result, it was expected in the local legal community that Delainey would probably receive a similar sentence to that of Timothy DeSpain.
However, Delainey’s desire to placate prosecutors appears to have backfired as Judge Hoyt commented during the sentencing hearing that his criminal conduct was “a lot deeper and a lot wider, . . . than is expressed in this charge.” Thus, the length of the sentence — and particularly the fact that Delainey was hauled off to jail straight from the courtroom — is mildly surprising. It is also tragic in that Delainey’s testimony during the Lay-Skilling trial was not particularly credible. My sense is that he agreed to the plea bargain solely to hedge the risk of a longer prison sentence on the charges.
By the way, this Kristen Hays/Chronicle article outlines the sentencing schedule for former Enron executives in the upcoming months.