Tucker is much different than we thought, and Martha is getting railroaded. REASON agrees with me. Here is the opening and the closing of the article. The Legal is in the middle, and can be read at the URL.
St. Martha
Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC
should go to hell.
Michael McMenamin
June did not bring much sunshine for New York City or good news for Martha Stewart. After twisting in the wind for nearly a year and a half, the Diva of Domesticity was sued for insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and indicted for securities fraud and obstruction of justice by the Department of Justice.
Those who are salivating over Stewart’s demise should put down their forks. In early 2002, when she was first questioned by the feds, all the news outlets reported speculation, based on anonymous government sources, that she had sold the last remnant of her ImClone stock on December 27, 2001, because her buddy, ImClone founder and CEO Sam Waksal, had told her that the Food and Drug Administration was about to reject an application for Erbitux, the company’s highly touted cancer drug. The news reports also suggested that she had lied to the feds about Waksal’s tip. But as the government now tacitly admits, neither of these allegations is true. That fact helps explain why the feds waited until June 2003 to bring charges: They had trouble finding anything to pin on Stewart.
The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged. ........
................The Justice Department and the SEC don’t care about the "fairness, efficiency, and integrity" of our capital markets. Letting Aliza Waksal keep her profits from insider trades proves that. The government lawyers want to enhance their own power and prestige. They don’t care who they hurt in the process, such as the shareholders of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, who saw the company’s value drop by over $400 million between December 2002 and August 2003.
What’s worse, these government lawyers don’t seriously expect to prevail at trial. Without a credible claim of insider trading against Stewart, the securities fraud charge based on her public (and truthful) denials of the government-leaked claims that she was guilty of insider trading will collapse. Martha will walk, and it will be a good thing. But she and her shareholders will have paid an unnecessary price. That’s not a good thing. It’s a disgrace. And a damn shame.
reason.com |
