Monday Business Roundup
Nacchio Waits as Jury Ponders
By Richard Martin, 4-16-07
The jury in the Joe Nacchio trial enters its third day of deliberations today, and so far there’s no indication that a verdict is forthcoming. Lengthy deliberations often indicate welcome news for the defendant, particularly in a case of insider trading like this one, where Nacchio never took the stand. However, one shrewd observer of this trial, Denver Post columnist Al Lewis, believes that Nacchio’s defense actually hurt his case: “The defense - also feeling confident prosecutors hadn’t made their case - only put forth three witnesses,” Lewis wrote on Friday. “ Prosecutors, however, gained momentum this week. They scored key testimony in cross-examining defense witnesses, including statements that Nacchio could have held his shares when he exercised his options instead of dumping them.”
One piece of intrigue surfaced last week when it became evident that former Qwest vice president for legal affairs Yash Rana, who featured prominently in the prosecution’s opening remarks, would not be called. Speaking without the jury present, prosecutor Cliff Stricklin told the judge that Rana had stated he would take the Fifth Amendment if called to the stand, to avoid self-incrimination for what the government called Nacchio’s backdating of a document ordering the sale of $14 million in stock.
Often the judge’s instructions to the jury in a case like this, which essentially hinges on the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the stock sales, can be crucial – but federal Judge Edward Nottingham kept his remarks bland to the point of being formulaic.
So, at this point it’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the former Qwest CEO, on trial for 42 counts of insider trading that could send him to prison for many, many years.
In other business news:
-- It’s a good time to be in the aerospace business in Colorado, which according to executives in Denver for last week’s National Space Symposium is soaring. Big deals like the $8.2 million contract to design and build NASA’s new Orion spacecraft, won by Lockheed Martin, plus the heft of the Colorado-based Lockheed-Boeing joint rocket venture, have brought Colorado’s total aerospace employment to No. 3 in the nation, behind California and Texas.
-- A little-known but influential Boulder institute, the International Research Center for Energy and Economic Development, is hosting a pair of conferences at the St. Julien Hotel this week. The 34th Annual International Energy Conference, “Living with Energy Uncertainty: Supplies and Prices,” runs Sunday through Tuesday, and the concurrent International Area Conference, “Can OPEC’s Power Expand?” (the Center’s 28th annual regional-focused event) is Tuesday and Wednesday. Expected attendees include representatives from the big oil companies plus energy ministers from many of the major oil-producing countries.
-- By now it’s a familiar story: tech company enjoys huge run-up in the late 1990s, goes public and sees its shares rise, only to watch the card-house crumble in the 2001 crash. A few doughty companies survived that roller coaster ride, and one of them is profiled in the Camera today: eSoft Inc., which had a market cap of $330 million at one point in the bubble days and then slashed its workforce and took itself private in 2002. Today, eSoft – which supplies security threat monitoring and protection software – is enjoying a revenue-growth rate of 30 to 50 percent per quarter.
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