|
Cablevision Gave Backdated Options To Dead Exec |
|
Friday, 22 September 2006 |
|
Do corporate executives have any shame? They have totally gone mad. They believe they can do anything they want with a total disregard for the law. Here’s another way how executives rip off their shareholders who they swear they are working for.
NEW YORK, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Cablevision Systems Corp. (CVC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) awarded options to an executive after his 1999 death, backdating them so that they appeared to have been granted while he was still alive, a regulatory filing revealed. A newspaper report said the executive's estate was the beneficiary. The cable operator also improperly granted options to a former compensation consultant, accounting for them as if the consultant were a Cablevision employee, the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The deceased executive was not named in the filing but he was identified by the Wall Street Journal as former Vice Chairman Marc Lustgarten. Cablevision declined to comment on the Journal report. The dead executive received at least 400,000 options from 1997 to 1999, according to filings. It was not clear how many of those were backdated. Lustgarten, who was 52 when he died of cancer in 1999, was a close confidant of Chief Executive James Dolan and Dolan's father, company founder Charles Dolan, the newspaper said. Lustgarten's estate was entitled to exercise all his stock options upon his death, the Journal said. The company said in the filing that its financial statements for 2003, 2004 and 2005 and other financial data should be restated as a result. |
