Florida court awards Mexican government massive civil judgment against former security chief
Judge Lisa Walsh ordered Genaro García Luna to pay more than $748 million and his wife Linda Cristina Pereyra to hand over more than $1.7 billion.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence defends Trump's federal takeover in DC
Former Vice President Mike Pence said he "welcomed" President Donald Trump's actions to combat crime in Washington, D.C., during an interview on CNN, Sunday.
Yahoo
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Twenty years ago, my research exposed one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history: It taught me that fraud is everywhere, just waiting to be revealed
Twenty years ago, I published a paper that helped uncover one of the largest corporate scandals in U.S. history. More than 100 public companies were implicated, dozens of executives resigned or faced criminal charges, and billions in earnings had to be restated. I never intended to be a whistleblower. I was simply doing what academics are trained to do: ask questions, follow the data, and let the evidence speak. But what the evidence revealed was staggering: executives at hundreds of companies were manipulating stock option grant dates to enrich their executives at the expense of shareholders. The practice became known as backdating. Now, on the 20th anniversary of that research, I see troubling parallels emerging in other corners of the financial world. A pattern too precise to be chance My journey into this murky corner of corporate behavior began with a desire to understand how executive compensation influenced firm decisions. While analyzing large datasets of compensation and stock prices, I noticed something peculiar: stock option grants often coincided with recent dips in the company's share price. Too often. The pattern was statistically improbable. It was as if executives had a crystal ball, repeatedly receiving options at the most opportune moment. But the truth was more mundane—and more troubling. Companies were retroactively selecting grant dates that coincided with low stock prices, effectively locking in instant, unearned gains. This allowed executives to buy shares at a discount while maintaining the illusion that they had to earn the discount by lifting the stock price. The simplicity of the scheme What made the fraud so insidious was its simplicity. Backdating didn't require complex financial engineering or elaborate cover-ups. It was a quiet manipulation of paperwork—choosing a date in the past when the stock price was low and pretending that was the day the options were granted. That simplicity likely contributed to its spread. There's evidence that individuals on multiple boards passed along the practice. But even isolated executives and directors could easily conceive the scheme, much like someone backdating a check to make it appear they paid a bill on time. Hidden in plain sight What struck me most was that backdating went unnoticed for at least a decade. It was a silent epidemic of opportunism. The option grant data was public. Thousands of participants were involved. Surely some auditors must have seen isolated traces of the fraud. But no one connected the dots. My research, combined with a timely nudge, eventually prompted the SEC to launch targeted investigations. Journalists followed, including a team at The Wall Street Journal with the time, resources, and incentives to pursue the story. Their work earned the paper its first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Parallels in other scandals I've since seen parallels of backdating in other financial scandals. For example, backdating is not the only fraud that depends on simply picking prices from the past. Bernie Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme used fabricated trades based on stale prices. Remarkably, Madoff's investors accepted these reports for years, despite the implausibility of the returns. Similarly, the mutual fund late-trading scandal allowed favored clients to illegally trade mutual funds late in the evening at stale prices from the end of the trading day. These cases show how much easier it is to perform well when you can reach back in time and choose a favorable moment to act. Today, I worry that similar dynamics may be unfolding in private equity. Many funds report valuations based on internal or third-party estimates shortly after acquiring assets. These valuations often appear inflated—sometimes even acknowledged as such by the firms themselves. Yet these funds are increasingly included in pension portfolios, exposing everyday investors to risks—and potentially fraud—they may not fully understand. The paradox of corporate fraud That's the paradox of corporate fraud: it's both obvious and invisible. The data is often there. The patterns are detectable. But with silent perpetrators, the deception persists. What gives me hope is that our tools for detecting fraud are more powerful than ever. We have better data, sharper analytical methods, and a growing community of skeptical citizen watchdogs. Because the next scandal won't be stopped by regulators alone. It will be stopped by someone who notices a pattern, asks a question, and refuses to look away. The opinions expressed in commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Fox News
2 hours ago
- Fox News
Jeanine Pirro says current DC justice system 'isn't cutting it' as Trump takes federal control
At the center of President Donald Trump's takeover of Washington, D.C.'s policing stands a familiar face: Jeanine Pirro. Once a regular fixture on "The Five," Pirro is now wielding federal power as the U.S. attorney for D.C., tasked with turning Trump's promise of "Liberation Day" into reality. In her words, "the first order of government is the protection of its people," and she intends to make D.C. that shining city on a hill once again. "[President Trump] wants to make D.C. safe and beautiful and part of my appointment here by the president was to follow through on that initiative, and the federalization of the Metropolitan PD is something that I think is a great thing and the agenda is very clear," she shared on 'My View with Lara Trump' over the weekend. "We want to make D.C. safe again." Pirro defended Trump's measure, stressing that it protects citizens' rights rather than eroding them — a direct rebuttal to critics on the left. She pointed to juvenile crime as a major pillar of reform, arguing that too many serious offenses are shuffled into family courts. In her words, the current system of rehabilitation, including "yoga" and "ice cream socials," simply "isn't cutting it" when violent teens are walking free. "If I have a 17-year-old who shoots someone with a gun, but he doesn't kill that person, I cannot... prosecute them, investigate them. It goes to the family court. The mission there is rehabilitation… and that just isn't cutting it with me or anyone else who's a law enforcement professional," she said. "For 30 years, I have fought the fight to make sure that we make criminals accountable and that we protect the victim. We are not doing enough to protect the victims in D.C." She argued that the crisis is hitting minority communities the hardest, noting that dozens of young African-American lives have been cut short in the past year and a half, with most cases unsolved. "We haven't arrested them, we haven't taken the guns from them, and that's what the president understands, and that is my mission." Pirro, on Sunday, pointed to the early results of Trump's initiative, which she says are already measurable: hundreds of arrests, dozens of illegal firearms seized, and fentanyl taken off the streets, in just the first week. At the same time, she dismissed protests erupting outside the White House as little more than political theater. "They should kiss the ground at this point that you've got someone who wants to make this city safe again, who wants to make it clean again," she told "Fox & Friends Weekend," warning that demonstrations disguised as "music festivals" were little more than a re-branding of crime. "But here's what the president's going to do: he's going to make a difference. We're going to change the laws," she added.
