(AP) Former Rite Aid Corp. chief executive Martin L. Grass was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday for conspiring to falsely inflate the value of the company his father founded and cover up the scheme. Grass, 50, who headed up the nation's third-largest pharmacy chain in the late 1990s before being forced out in October 1999, also was fined $500,000 and given three years' probation for his role in a billion-dollar accounting fraud that sent the company's stock tumbling. Before U.S. District Judge Sylvia H. Rambo handed down the sentence, Grass apologized to Rite Aid, its stockholders and employees. "For the harm caused to them, I am truly sorry," he said. Grass was indicted by a federal grand jury two years ago.
HIST101-1403B-05 Modern American History: 1950 to the 21st Century Phase 2 Social Unrest and Watergate Individual Project September 1, 2014 The Watergate burglaries, took place May 28 and June 17, 1972. There were five men who were apprehended inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building during the second burglary. After being caught during the second burglary these individuals implicated themselves on other counts and charges by voluntarily telling investigators about having committed a previous break in. During the investigation of one of the 5 men arrested James McCord turned up information that Nixon had known of the burglary and attempted to cover up any White House involvement. The evidence that surfaced was able to link Nikon to destroying key documents to cover-up of the break in as well as uncovering that the Nixon reelection committee had run “dirty schemes and tricks” during the campaign against the Democrats.
After selling their lies and plans for the war to the America people, congress had given President Bush carte blanche to bring justice to those who caused pain and destruction on American soil. Abu Ghraib Prison, also known as Baghdad Central Prison, became the U.S Army detention center for captured Iraqis. “For decades under Saddam Hussein, many prisoners who were taken to the Abu Ghraib prison never came out. It was the centerpiece of Saddam's empire of fear, and those prisoners who did make it out told nightmarish tales of torture beyond imagining – and executions without reason.” (Abuse of Iraqi POWS by GIs Probed, 2004) In 2004 rumors began to surface, regarding the abuse of prisoners held by the U.S army. Initially the U.S media expressed little interest to the accusations, until photographic evidence emerged, exposing the violation of the prisoner’s human rights.
Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced. David Findel, 45, of Monmouth County, N.J., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Peter G. Sheridan in Trenton federal court. He had previously pleaded guilty to an information charging him with wire fraud. According to the information to which Findel pleaded guilty and statements made in Trenton federal court: Findel is the former CEO of Worldwide Financial Resources (“Worldwide”), which was in the business of originating residential home loans. Worldwide worked with borrowers to prepare mortgage applications and qualify the borrowers for home mortgages.
These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed, and shook the publics’ faith in the security markets. When examining the SOX act you can see that since 2002 many things have changed in the past eight years. Corporate governance is one of many things that have changed; Public companies must now have a totally separate audit committee composed of entirely independent directors and must contain one financial expert. Security fraud now has much more extreme punishments for those who commit or conspire to commit fraud. Since the introduction of SOX auditors of public companies must keep documentation of an audit for seven years, destruction of any documentation or evidence that someone has committed fraud is now punishable by jail time and fine.
The Watergate Scandal The Watergate Scandal was a very low point in American history dealing with government and its corruption during this time. It started with multiple burglars breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The scandal occurred from around March of 1971 to September 8, 1974 when then president Gerald Ford gave a full pardon to Richard Nixon for “all offenses against the United States committed between January 20, 1969 and August 9, 1974. (Watergate Chronology/spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk) It began on March 20, 1971 when Fredrick LaRue and Gordon Liddy attended a meeting where the members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREP) where the members agreed to commit $250,000 to “intelligence gathering” operation against the Democratic Party. Then about one year after the original meeting, John N. Mitchell and Jeb Macgruger talk about the proposal made by Gordon Liddy a year earlier to place a wiretap on the phone of the chairman of the national Democratic Party Larry O’Brien.
Vietnam: Effects on America- http://www.glynn.k12.ga.us/BHS/academics/junior/durham/daniels11885/home.html Part 3- Why was the Watergate scandal so important? It was important because, President Richard Nixon got caught with many crime charges. He got elected out of office for many of the crimes. The purpose of this was to explain what Watergate Scandal was, what happened to President Nixon. The original audience of this would have been the publics, from the government.
“It was the first time in our nation's history that a President had been assassinated. As cries from citizens rang out, Congress began to think about adding Presidential protection to the list of duties performed by the Secret Service” (Inside the White House) however this would have to wait. “In 1865, up to one-half of all the paper money in America was counterfeit” (About.com: US Government Info) so the idea of a Secret service as a organization dedicated to fixing this problem was put forth. After about three months of getting through the red tape and deciding the duties of this new group, “on July 5, 1865, Congress created the US Secret Service under the Treasury Department -- to stop the counterfeiting” (About.com: US Government Info). The success of this organization was amazing and the Secret Service began to make a name for its self.
Cheney’s Law and Obama’s Deal are both examples of executive leadership and decision making cause and effects that have been embraced in our country. Three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Cheney and his lawyer David Addington persuaded the department to grant President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy and without congressional approval or judicial review. Obama promised change, then he took on one of the toughest issues in Washington the healthcare reform and he angered his political base, watched his popularity sink, and nearly failed to pass the bill. David Addington and Dick Cheney shared many similar
On July 22, 2002, MCI WorldCom (hereafter known as WorldCom) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest filing in U.S. History at the time (Beltran, 2002). It is clear that senior-level executives were holding the reigns throughout the elaborate and, what one analyst called, “incredibly elegant (Simons, 2002),” scam, intended to defraud investors and Wall Street. To someone not familiar with accounting processes, the case becomes difficult to understand. The executives were falsifying accounting entries, both creating accounting line items that did not exist and counterfeiting actual entries to inflate earnings (Boatright, p.44). The 1990s proved to be an excellent decade for WorldCom, particularly after the 1997 purchase of MCI, which was the largest national long-distance phone carrier at the time, and resulted in the largest corporate merger in the history of the United States.