Possumblog

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

REDIRECT ALERT! (Scroll down past this mess if you're trying to read an archived post. Thanks. No, really, thanks.)

Due to my inability to control my temper and complacently accept continued silliness with not-quite-as-reliable-as-it-ought-to-be Blogger/Blogspot, your beloved Possumblog will now waddle across the Information Dirt Road and park its prehensile tail at http://possumblog.mu.nu.

This site will remain in place as a backup in case Munuvia gets hit by a bus or something, but I don't think they have as much trouble with this as some places do. ::cough::blogspot::cough:: So click here and adjust your links. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it's one of those things.

Friday, April 25, 2003

Five outta five...

HealthSouth co-founder to admit to bank fraud

RUSSELL HUBBARD
News staff writer

Former HealthSouth Corp. finance chief Aaron Beam Jr. agreed Thursday to plead guilty to criminal charges and help the government investigate the role of fired CEO Richard Scrushy in accounting fraud totaling $2.5 billion.

Beam, a company founder, agreed to plead guilty to bank fraud, admitting he lied when using HealthSouth financial statements to secure loans from Birmingham's AmSouth Bank and other lenders, prosecutors said.

He is the fifth out of five HealthSouth finance chiefs in company history to agree to help the government build a criminal case against Scrushy, who is accused in a government civil lawsuit of orchestrating a profit-inflating scheme between 1997 and mid-2002. [...]

Hmm. This one is going to be much harder to explain away as some sort of wild conspiracy by a jealous cohort of underlings bent on dumping Dickie Bird and taking over the company. Beam was there from the beginning, and was a friend of Scrushy--

[...] Beam's guilty plea agreement makes him the first of the company's founders to submit to government charges of fraud. He worked at Houston-based hospital operator Lifemark Corp. with Scrushy and quit with him in 1984 to found HealthSouth.

HealthSouth's corporate history published last year quoted Beam on his decision to leave Lifemark and join up with Scrushy:

"I went home and told my wife that I just interviewed with the biggest con artist I ever met or the most brilliant young man I ever met," the book quotes Beam as saying. "Either way, I was taking the job because he was really, really good at what he did." [...]

I know they'll try, but Scrushy's legal team are going to have a very difficult time spinning this as something positive for their client.

posted by Terry at 9:15:00 AM

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