AOL Fraud Case Nears an End
Friday, January 05, 2007
Prosecution rests in long-running fraud case against two former AOL executives and another from PurchasePro, report says.
As reported at CNNmoney.com today, January 5, 2007, federal prosecutors concluded their case on Thursday against two former AOL executives, another published report cites. The case, that began in October of 2006 is reportedly by the Washington Post, as one of the longest ever criminal trials to be held in the U.S. District Court of Alexandria, VA. Time Warner owns AOL, as most people already know. But probably not as well known, is that Time Warner also owns CNNmoney.com.
CNNMoney.com's continued report:
More than three dozen government witnesses testified about complex accounting tricks that were allegedly done by the defendants dating back to early 2001, soon after the so-called bursting of the Internet bubble.
The paper reports testimony in the case was that managers at AOL struggled to show revenue and advertising gains by making questionable deals with dot-com business partners in which no revenue changed hands.
AOL is a unit of Time Warner (Charts), which also owns CNNMoney.com.
Time Warner agreed to pay more than $500 million to settle joint civil and criminal charges against the company two years ago.
There are two remaining former AOL executives facing charges in the case, according to the report: business affairs executive Kent Wakeford and Netbusiness unit vice president John Tuli. In addition, Christopher Benyo, a former employee of the dot.com company PurchasePro, is also a defendant, according to the report.
But PurchasePro founder Charles "Junior" Johnson, who was originally a defendant as well, was separated from the case and had his trial declared a mistrial for undisclosed reasons, the paper reports. Federal prosecutors intend to retry him.
In addition, the paper reports that two former AOL officials who led the business-affairs operation, David Colburn and Eric Keller, had their names come up regularly in testimony and had once had been the focus of government investigation. But charges were never filed against them and the five-year statute of limitations against them expired early last year.
The Post reports that defense lawyers could wrap up their case in the next several days, and that none have indicated they will testify in the case.
Click here for the article at CNNmoney.com
Permanent Link to this Article ||
.
0 Comments:
New!
July 13 2006
This site and blog are not necessarily against AOL. It's a critique of some of the methods AOL uses or some may say abuses toward it's customers and/or the internet at large.
Visiting Dear AOL, for example, will reveal a petition that some are signing in order to stop AOL from sending allowed spam to your AOL email-box.
Are you being threatened with trademark infringement? Have you been ordered to transfer your domain name over? Here are some resources:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
About This Blog
This blog was formed after AOL™ or America Online ™ - an online service provider - sent a threatening notice to the Registrar of the domain name www.aol-icq.net telling them to transfer it to AOL. The notice made assertions of copyright infringement of the name and even went so far as to assert their ownership of the once non-AOL controlled name ICQ™. At first blush, this may seem not so unreasonable. However. The former owner of www.aol-icq.com, acquired circa 1998 for the purpose of helping AOL members use ICQ while on AOL, is the same owner of www.aol-icq.net, which was acquired in 2002 when an accidental missing of the deadline left it open for AOL to register it.
Therefore, does this latest AOL threat sound like Reverse Domain Name Hijacking?
