$2.65 billion Time Warner accounting settlement OK'd by Judge

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$2.65 billion Time Warner accounting settlement OK'd by Judge

engine

2:30 pm on Apr 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

A federal judge has approved a settlement that calls for Time Warner, the world's largest media company, to pay $2.65 billion to settle charges that AOL overstated its revenue to gain approval for the companies' megamerger.
Time Warner agreed last August to the settlement with a group of shareholders who accused AOL of inflating its revenue by $1.7 billion between January 1999 and August 2002.
U.S. District Court Judge Shirley Wohl Kram approved the settlement on Thursday.

[news.zdnet.com...]

iblaine

6:37 pm on Apr 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

Very interesting. This has been in the works for a long time. Stealing Time was a great book detailing the AOL shenanigans and it finally has an ending.

percentages

7:49 am on Apr 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

>With the most recent settlement, Time Warner has paid more than $3.5 billion to resolve the accounting issues.

Good post....but, who paid for that?

johnlew

11:06 pm on Apr 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

It pleases me so much to see aol and time warner to have to fork it over. I feel bad about deriving pleasure from that ... but not that bad.

deluxcougar

8:26 pm on Apr 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

The article states that Time Warner has to pay this to a group of stockholders. This seems to be counter-productive. Meaning, we didn't make more money because AOL misstated their earnings so we want you to pay us out of your pocket to compensate us. Won't this drive stock prices down?

I hope these shareholders sold there stock already :)

johnlew

10:39 pm on Apr 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Its more of a distribution of money question than value of overall shares. When a company like AOL misstates earnings a large number of people are compelled to invest, driving up the share value. The primary shareholders benefit from this much more than the general shareholders. In other words, by misstating profits a few shareholders profit by selling overvalued shares to a large number of people.

If the deal was done fairly the investors were repaid for their shares. This is not bad for the people who got duped, but yes, its not good for the overall share value of AOL. Its a general rule that bad managment is not good for share value.