Details about this story
- Source: Wall Street Journal
- Date: March 18, 2006
- URL: Read the story
- Bylines:
James Bandler ,
Charles Forrelle
- Topics:
Business
- Data Types:
Other Data
- Description/Excerpt: The Journal's analysis of grant dates and stock movements suggests the problem may be broader. It identified several companies with wildly improbable option-grant patterns. While this doesn't prove chicanery, it shows something very odd: Year after year, some companies' top executives received options on unusually propitious dates.
The analysis bolsters recent academic work suggesting that backdating was widespread, particularly from the start of the tech-stock boom in the 1990s through the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform act of 2002. If so, it was another way some executives enriched themselves during the boom at shareholders' expense. And because options grants are long-lived, some executives holding backdated grants from the late 1990s could still profit from them today.
- Methodology: See explainer
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