As I understand it, the explanation of the "false accounting records" and "losing business" had to do with expected government contracts vanishing because of refusing to cooperate about the NSA surveillance.
Losing a contract with the NSA because they didn't play with the NSA certainly sounds like a real thing. Telling the markets that they would continue to see national security contracts when he knew they would not is another. Presenting false accounting records is entirely unrelated and just banal fraud. Selling your own shares while doing these things is even worse.
This really closes the loop. If the Feds cancelled contracts because of Nacchio's refusal to do business and then indicted him on fraud because he probably could not tell others that those contracts were cancelled (as with other similar wiretap/NSL requests)...
That's ridiculous. There's no NDA in the world that prevents you from disclosing the true financials of your company. You don't need to specify who you're serving. His charge of insider trading is because he blatantly lied about the company doing well to inflate the price while selling his shares knowing it was not.
No, it absolutely is not. Not even close. Love for clever little hacker things does not carry any weight here. How could you possibly believe that it would have been illegal for this company to correctly state the amount of revenue it received?
You do not need to acknowledge that you received an NSL in order to acknowledge you are no longer providing services to the NSA. You do not need to reference the NSA or NSL at all in order to correctly state revenue, because you are not required to show all of the entities with which you're doing business.
It is fully possible to pretend you simply lost the NSA contract for non-NSL related reasons. His fraud is his own doing
So if I'm piecing this together correctly, he decided he wasn't going to help out NSA. This led to him losing government contracts, which would lower the value of his company. So instead of taking the stock price hit (which would be the principled thing to do), he created false accounting records to defraud investors. And while he was publicly preaching that the Qwest was just fine, he was unloading his own stock.
And this is the guy I'm supposed to be sympathetic of?
