Adelphia fraud case --- Allan (slow)
Chart of the day --- Tom (slow)
>> the chief financial officer from credit suisse first boston is leaving the firm. her decision coming days before the new csfb chief executive, brady dugan, is expected to announce a new management team. this is according to a person familiar with the matter. she is 45 years old, the company’s highest ranking female executive and a member of credit suisse group’s executive board. a federal judge declared a mistrial in the remaining charges in the adelphia fraud case. allan dodds frank has been covering the trial and deliberations and joins us from lower manhattan with the latest. allan?
>> matt, judge leonard sand called a mistrial after the jury told him we have tried after no avail. after nine days of deliberations, they could not reach a unanimous decision about michael rigas and two counts of bank fraud and 15 counts of securities fraud against him. they acquitted him yesterday of one count of conspiracy and five counts of wire fraud. at the same time, they acquitted assistant treasurer michael mulcahey of all 23 counts and found michael rigas’s father,% -john rigas, former c.e.o. and founder of adelphia communications, guilty of conspiracy as well as fraud counts and securities fraud counts as well as michael’s% -brother, timothy, who was adelphia’s chief financial officer. we heard from michael rigas’s lawyer as they left the court.
>> it’s a good result for us. unfortunately, the government may retry him but i’m positive when they think about it and the acquittal on the counts, they won’t retry him.
>> i asked david kelly, the u.s. attorney who was in court, and he had no comment about whether the government will seek to retry michael rigas. earlier this week, outside the court on a bench, i talked off the record with john rigas and he said i could relate quickly on the record today what he said. he said that wall street had been too eager to give him money. he made a big mistake. they lent him billions and that ended up overleveraging the company, causing the collapse into bankruptcy and ultimately this trial that led to his conviction. matt?
>> thank you very much.% appreciate it.% if we plov on, here, now, another court-related story, m.c.i., emerging from the largest bankruptcy case in history in april, is suing former c.e.o., bernard ebbers, to recover $408 million in loans. the company, formerly known as worldcom, is seeking to dismiss ebbers’ $12 million claim against it. this, according to a suit filed in the u.s. bankruptcy court in new york. imagine this, if you will, $1.32 per euro, what goldman sachs forecasts for july of next year, making europe’s exports more expensive and threaten the franelile german economy, the subject of our “chart of the day.”% here with a discussion is our editor at large, tom keene. take it away, $1.32 per euro.
>> up 6.5%, a big move. here’s what’s happened in rapid order in a quiet summer week. the dollar was stronger and now we’ve seen the stronger euro in the face of somewhat tepid u.s. data. goldman sachs changes their u.s. forecast, lowering them. their currency team in london changes the dollar forecast, calling for a weak dollar into 2005. if we go to the chart, matt, you see the euro back to 2000. red is the trend line, above parity, a dollar per one euro. it all fits well on trend line. goldman sachs’ 2005 forecast is up here with the white circle at $1.32. so we say, so what, the starbucks coffee in london is more expensive and in paris you’ll face that this summer.
>> terrible.
>> but the serious issue here is a weak europe and germany reliant on exports, their exports become expensive, the german economy slows down and they may even have less inflation and you may get that deflation fear again in europe. so it’s complex.
>> if goldman is right, it would seem that would put the focus purely on brussels and the e.u. to do something.
>> it puts it on the political and economic experiments that is europe. this would be a real test. $1.32 euro, most of the experts i talk to say that’s the first big test of the european union.
>> it’s funny it used the word experiment because you have to remember how young that currency is and it is unchartered waters and they’re adding more members all the time, another dozen or so members.
>> 10 members.
>> 10 members coming in. will that be a factor?
>> here’s how it works -- germany, if they have the deutsche marc, could amend their strategy using the deutsche marc but they can’t amend the euro because they need the votes of the other nations so they have a limited quiver of arrows and limited tool box, so it’s an interesting experiment.
>> thanks, tom, cutting edge stuff from tom keene. also coming up, we’ll look at abbott labs, a company expecting sales of its humira drug to rise to more than $1 billion. that’s a blockbuster in the pharmaceutical circles. we’ll hear from the chief executive, miles white, about the growth strategy.
