Americas
Corporate Scandal in the United States
Viewpoints: The WorldCom Scandal
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| Former WorldCom Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services, July 8, 2002 (Photo: AFP). |
Dublin The Irish Times (centrist), July 10: Already this crisis has affected the performance of the U.S. economy and the dollar internationally....It has put the spotlight on suspect accounting standards throughout the capitalist world....The issue gives the Democrats a real opportunity to make gains at the Republicans’ expense in the upcoming Congressional elections. It presents Mr. Bush with a stern test of his domestic credibility.
Manila Manila Times (pro-government, English-language), July 13: The problem the Bush government truly faces is how to stave off the steadily declining public trust and confidence in corporate America. There is a need...to institute measures that would enable the government to catch and unmask corporate crooks. This is important...in order to restore public trust and confidence in the nation’s financial markets.
—Godofredo M. Roperos
Sofia Dnevnik (moderate left-wing), June 26: Until recently, America was pretending that it was offering the world an indisputable model of success....More than a thousand U.S. companies have admitted that they published false figures in the ‘90s. That means the much-hyped and lucrative growth of Clinton’s “New Economy” may prove to be a hot-air balloon, and one overblown with foreign money.
Havana Granma International (Communist Party weekly), July 11: [These scandals are] not a sudden, passing illness of the major U.S. corporations, but revelations of their true character. From time to time they would get caught, and the government would be forced to do something about it, as Bush and the U.S. Congress are now by raising modest clamor and announcing tough measures to “prevent” the mega-frauds from happening in the future. But it’s all just an act.
—Joquin Rivery Tur
Bogotá El Tiempo (centrist), July 10: [Merck and WorldCom] will not be the last companies in trouble....Americans must be wondering if their prodigious prosperity of the past decade is more the work of some manipulative executives, bankers, and accountants than of a system that rewards hard work.
Beijing China Daily (state-run), July 11: Who is responsible? It is easy enough to place the blame on one or two bad apples, but most major frauds are carefully planned and executed. The revelations of the corporate misdeeds of Enron and WorldCom confirm that there is an urgent need to rein in greedy and over-powerful chief executives and to curb rampant abuse of stock options.
Singapore Business Times (pro-government, financial), July 1: It isn’t a matter of just a few crooked or greedy individuals; it wasn’t just a handful of CEOs and CFOs...but a huge supporting cast as well: auditors, lawyers, investment banks, management consultants, portfolio managers, stock analysts, institutional investors, and financial journalists. Everybody believed everybody else was doing it, so why not do it too? What has been going on is too big to be dismissed as the result of the actions of a few individuals—a few “bad eggs.”
—Vikram Khanna
