Former WorldCom Inc Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers surrendered to federal authorities in New York on Wednesday, a day after the government charged him with orchestrating the largest ever US accounting fraud.
Wearing a blue blazer, pale blue tie and with his trademark shock of white hair cut short, Ebbers, accompanied by his attorney, Reid Weingarten, strode through a throng of reporters and photographers and into the New York offices of the FBI.
Ebbers did not speak to reporters as he entered the building.
After a few hours of processing, the 62-year-old high-school-basketball-coach-turned-telecom-tycoon will be taken by federal marshals to be arraigned before the same US District Court judge who accepted a guilty plea 24 hours earlier from Ebbers' former right hand man, Scott Sullivan.
At that time, Ebbers will be asked to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty to the three charges against him - fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements about WorldCom's financial condition as it spiralled into bankruptcy amid an $11 billion bookkeeping scandal.
The charges were unveiled on Tuesday by US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who travelled to New York to announce them. An Ebbers conviction could be a major election-year coup for the Bush administration, which Democrats have accused of pandering to big business.
"Corporate executives who cheat investors by deceiving them about the nature of their businesses are not above the law and will be held responsible," Ashcroft told a news conference after the charges were filed on Tuesday.
Ebbers is the biggest figure yet to be charged in the wave of corporate scandals that has roiled the US business world and led to billions of dollars in investor losses.
The case's importance as a symbol of the self-enrichment that pervaded corporate boardrooms in the boom years of the late 1990s was underscored by Ashcroft's unusual decision to come to New York to announce the charges in person.
Ebbers built WorldCom from a Mississippi upstart into the nation's No 2 long-distance phone company, amassing a huge personal fortune along the way before the company collapsed in 2002. At one point, he owned a cattle ranch in Canada billed as the world's largest.
Key to the government's case against him will be the co-operation of Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer and at one time Ebbers' top lieutenant.
Sullivan on Tuesday pleaded guilty to three criminal charges, admitting conspiracy to falsify the company's books by inflating revenues and improperly recording expenses to boost earnings and cash flow.
Ebbers' indictment follows government charges brought last month against Jeffrey Skilling, former chief executive of energy company Enron Corp, which also fell into bankruptcy in a massive bookkeeping scandal. The top figure at Enron, former Chairman Kenneth Lay, has not been charged.
The government said Ebbers, who resigned from WorldCom in 2002 as its problems began to emerge, demanded that the company's financial results match Wall Street expectations. He could be convicted solely on the testimony of Sullivan, legal experts say.
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