It's good to see that white-collar crime still enjoys its preferential status here in Australia. John Gay, the erstwhile CEO of Gunns Timber, has just been sentenced for insider trading. As his company was crumbling around him, he sold $3.1 million worth of shares knowing that their value would plummet within days.
A deal was worked out that he would plead guilty on the understanding that he would not admit that he knew that the shares would drop, only that he should have known that this was a possibility. This is a CEO who was paid $1 million salary and recklessly brought his company to bankruptcy by stubbornly trying to build a pulp mill in an unsuitable area even when all the odds were stacked against him.
Oh, and his sentence was a $50,000 fine. Thank goodness he wasn't caught shoplifting or he might have been sent to gaol.
Gunns had been Tasmania's biggest company for many years but is now in receivership. They built a new head office in Launceston about 5 or 6 years ago, when it was riding high. It was a modem single storey structure which soon became the focus for demonstrations by the residents of the Tamar Valley opposed to the site of the pulp mill.
The site has been bought by Bunnings for a new megastore and a couple of weeks ago the bulldozers rolled in and demolished the relatively new building. No attempt was made to salvage anything; even the airconditioners were still in place. I know it was probably cheaper to do it that way but we're obsessed with recycling in every other area and I wonder how worthwhile it s to keep washing out our milk cartons when the same effort is not expected of industry..
A deal was worked out that he would plead guilty on the understanding that he would not admit that he knew that the shares would drop, only that he should have known that this was a possibility. This is a CEO who was paid $1 million salary and recklessly brought his company to bankruptcy by stubbornly trying to build a pulp mill in an unsuitable area even when all the odds were stacked against him.
Oh, and his sentence was a $50,000 fine. Thank goodness he wasn't caught shoplifting or he might have been sent to gaol.
Gunns had been Tasmania's biggest company for many years but is now in receivership. They built a new head office in Launceston about 5 or 6 years ago, when it was riding high. It was a modem single storey structure which soon became the focus for demonstrations by the residents of the Tamar Valley opposed to the site of the pulp mill.
The site has been bought by Bunnings for a new megastore and a couple of weeks ago the bulldozers rolled in and demolished the relatively new building. No attempt was made to salvage anything; even the airconditioners were still in place. I know it was probably cheaper to do it that way but we're obsessed with recycling in every other area and I wonder how worthwhile it s to keep washing out our milk cartons when the same effort is not expected of industry..
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