August 6, 2007 -
Although he committed stock option fraud on a massive scale, Ryan Brant has avoided prison time.As reported by Bloomberg News, the disgraced former Take Two CEO copped a plea, cooperated with prosecutors and agreed to pony up $7.3 million to federal and state agencies.
Brant will also serve five years on probation.
It would appear that Brant's cooperation may have helped lead prosecutors to a pair of other Take Two employees. Former General Counsel Kenneth Selterman and ex-Chief Accounting Officer Patti Tay also plead guilty.
Brant, 35, told the judge:
I'm deeply sorry for my role as an executive in the company and my role in the options dating process.
GP: It's disheartening to see a guy who stole millions of dollars avoiding jail. We'll bet the ranch that some of the little fish caught up in last week's mod chip sweep end up doing time.
Comments
Do I need to cite reasons in order for my comment to be allowed on here? I am sick of seeing these evil motherfuckers got off easy when ordinary people get completely fucked by their government everyday.
thank you Lou Dobbs! :P
oh fcking Christ HEIL!!HEIL!!HEIL!! to the republican Reich!
oh wait hes not part of the libby scandle..........
gaaa I need glasses >
As for hefty fines, they're only hefty if the guy doesn't have millions, or even just a spare million stashed away somwhere. Even an outright pirate that was caught last May only paid $1,200 in fines, which is a LOT to me but he made $266,000 from his illegal business.
But yeah, I hear you guys loud and clear. The bad man got spanked, and probably adequately and fairly so. Case closed :)
-Probation for 5 years.
-Banned from management positions.
It's a good thing Brant wasn't pirating software too, he may have got the chair.
In all seriousness though, I highly doubt any of last weeks "little fish" (like the guy with one mod chip) will spend more than a weekend in jail. Just enough to drive home the fact that this is a no-no. Not horribly unjust, I think.
Andrew Eisen
As to the mod chip thing, that's a whole different story being handled by a whole different set of people. If anything comes of it, I'm going to be very upset.
well those cases were somewhat huge, if they were sentenced as innocent people would roar against it.
Thanks for the interesting read. Those were also cases that had HUGE mainstream attention, do you think that their outcome was influenced by the amount of coverage? If Ryan Brant was getting railed on national TV would he be in jail as well?
Brant, 35, pleaded guilty in February to falsifying business records. As part of a plea agreement with Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, he avoided prison time by cooperating with an investigation of illegal backdating at the company, the maker of ``Grand Theft Auto'' video games.
``This is a good reminder in an atmosphere where corporate heads are being sent to lengthy prison terms that, if you cooperate and you own up, you will be rewarded for your efforts,'' said former prosecutor Thomas Curran, a white collar defense lawyer at Ganfer & Shore in New York.
More than 200 companies have disclosed internal or federal probes into whether they inflated the value of options awarded to executives by backdating or timing the grants to coincide with days when their stock price was low.
Thanks 4 the spam. Fuck off & die plz kthxbye.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_trial_of_Kenneth_Lay_and_Jeffrey_Skilli...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart#Insider_Trading_Charges
Have you ever heard of white and blue collar crime differentiation ?
Sadly we live in a society which hold a highly corrupted system.