With the Senate Judiciary Committee preparing to hold hearings tomorrow on abuses of the corporate bankruptcy process, social justice group the Gray Panthers distributed to Capitol Hill offices yesterday a binder detailing what it calls “the epic fraud of WorldCom/MCI and the recent failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the General Services Administration and others to adequately penalize the firm.”
The document can be found at http://www.graypanthers.org.
"The record on this matter is clear,” states Gray Panthers Corporate Accountability Project Director Will Thomas in a letter accompanying the briefing book. “The federal government should not be in the business of rewarding corporate criminals. WorldCom/MCI should be debarred, and their outrageous use of tax loopholes ended. WorldCom's fraud picks seniors' pockets and steals their futures. First, the value of their
pension funds was damaged when $176 billion dollars in investor value was wiped out in the largest fraud in American history, three times larger than Enron's. The company continues to hold the assets it acquired through fraud, and plans to escape most of its debt during bankruptcy; this sends the signal that corporate crime pays, undermining any faith seniors can have in the market to help secure their retirements going forward."
The Gray Panthers letter also urges members of congress to support SB 1331 “to close the obscure loophole in the tax code that would allow this corrupt company to claim $6.6 billion in previous WorldCom tax year losses to offset expected taxes on future earnings.” The group says is estimated that this maneuver would save WorldCom more than $2.5 billion dollars.
