Part 1: Dubious Deals
Dot-con job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride
seattletimes.nwsource.com
© 2005, The Seattle Times
By David Heath and Sharon Pian Chan / Seattle Times staff reporters
Five years ago this week, at the height of the dot-com stock frenzy, a young Bellevue company called InfoSpace was worth more than Boeing.
Wall Street analysts hailed the startup, which promised to bring the Internet to everyone's cellphone, as "a new Microsoft," and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, as a visionary.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had hundreds of millions invested. Small investors such as Bev Hess, a real-estate agent in Phillips, Neb., poured their retirement savings into what appeared to be a sure bet.
At its peak, InfoSpace was the Northwest's biggest Internet business, worth more than $31 billion. Jain, a man obsessed with being more successful than Bill Gates, was himself worth $8 billion. He bought a palatial waterfront home in Medina down the street from his idol and another nearby on Mercer Island, along with two yachts and a piece of the Seattle SuperSonics.
What Paul Allen, Bev Hess and hundreds of other shareholders didn't know was this: InfoSpace's success was an illusion, created by lies and deception.
Jain and other InfoSpace executives deceived the public by making the company appear far more successful than it was, a Seattle Times investigation has found.
The investigation — built on internal company e-mails, confidential documents filed in court and scores of interviews — found that Jain and others created the illusion of revenues with accounting tricks and dubious deals.
One e-mail from a venture capitalist to Jain captures the nature of the deals. The man refused to participate in an investment that Jain had proposed, bluntly telling Jain that if he did so, "I believe that I could go to jail."
The Times' investigation found:
• InfoSpace officials misled Wall Street and the public about how their company was doing, concealing that revenues were falling far short of expectations.
• Much of InfoSpace's reported revenue came from "lazy Susan" deals, whereby company officials invested in other firms that turned around and gave back the same money.
• Wall Street analysts, including famed dot-com guru Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch, privately expressed grave concerns about InfoSpace while at the same time publicly touting its stock. In a private e-mail to colleagues, Blodget asked, "Is this really a world-class company, or just a world-class storyteller?" Soon after, he gave InfoSpace stock his highest rating.
• While investors clamored to buy InfoSpace's highly touted stock, company insiders were unloading it. Two executives later angled to get around trading restrictions by asking for demotions to sell stock before its value evaporated.
Jain himself accused several of his top executives of engaging in illegal insider trading by misleading shareholders and then dumping their stock.
When the game was up, the investors took a beating. Stock worth $1,000 in March 2000 was worth only $2.67 by June 2002. The company once worth more than Boeing fell to the value of two Boeing 777s.
Allen lost an estimated $400 million when InfoSpace shares collapsed. Hess, 65, saw her $40,000 investment shrink to $1,450.
"I scrimped and saved for 42 years, and I feel that I have been duped out of my hard-earned money," she said.
Hess explained that she plunged into InfoSpace after reading glowing reports from stock analysts and media accounts of Jain and InfoSpace. "I feel like the American public was lied to," she said.
At its peak, InfoSpace alone accounted for about a third of the $100 billion in stock value created by the Puget Sound area's 20 publicly traded dot-coms. The company played a major role in the region's dot-com boom, which produced legions of young, overnight millionaires and defined an era.
Most of that wealth seemed to have been the product of a speculative stock-market bubble. However, the inside story of InfoSpace shows that, at least in this case, investors were manipulated.
The system did little to protect them. A shareholder sued InfoSpace for misleading investors, but a King County judge handling the case kept thousands of pages of damaging documents from investors who claimed they were wronged.
Rather than investigate Jain for misconduct, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission aided Jain in court after he hired a prominent former SEC lawyer to lobby the agency.
InfoSpace today appears to be a far different company. Jain and other key players are gone. The board hired James Voelker as chief executive two years ago because "they wanted to go in a new direction," Voelker said.
The real story behind InfoSpace's rise and fall comes to light now because The Seattle Times recently won a two-year legal battle that went up to the state Supreme Court. The high court's decision led to the release in October of thousands of pages of records that had been sealed in a shareholder lawsuit.
The documents, along with scores of interviews and other records, offer a rare, uncensored look into the inner workings of what was once considered one of the most successful dot-coms on Wall Street.
A drive to succeed
Naveen Jain grew up in a culture mired in bribery and corruption, yet in a religion that deplores dishonesty.
Born in 1959, Jain lived in villages throughout Uttar Pradesh, one of India's largest and least literate provinces. His family takes its name from their religion, Jainism, whose followers take vows to abstain from stealing, violence and telling lies.
Jain's father, a civil engineer for the public-works department, fervently followed these beliefs, said Atul Jain, Naveen's younger brother. Their father, at risk to his life, defied the local custom of taking bribes. Atul Jain said his father sometimes had to be escorted by a bodyguard.
The Jains lived in small rental homes with running water and electricity. Naveen Jain, however, wanted a different life and admired business leaders who "built so much from nothing." He earned a degree in engineering from Indian Institutes of Technology, a highly competitive university.
Jain came to the United States as a young man through a business-exchange program and in 1989 joined Microsoft, run by "my absolute role model," Bill Gates.
Jain had modest success at Microsoft and was working on Microsoft Network when a seismic event rocked the Internet world on Aug. 9, 1995. Netscape Communications, maker of the popular Internet browser, began selling its stock to the public. The company had made not a dime in profit but ended the day worth $2.2 billion.
Netscape's spectacular stock run-up marked the beginning of the dot-com era: No longer did companies, particularly Internet startups, have to show a few years of profit before Wall Street would consider offering their stock to the public.
Jain watched the dot-com explosion from the Microsoft Network (MSN), which was having a chaotic and disappointing launch.
In March 1996, he quit and started InfoSpace. His plan all along was to take his new company public as soon as possible. Jain and six employees, most of them ex-Microsoft workers, began building online e-mail and telephone directories that would generate revenue from ads.
INTERVIEWS JANUARY 2003
Listen to Naveen Jain talk about the InfoSpace culture, his best deal, lessons learned and more.
His enthusiasm for the Internet and his drive to succeed were infectious. Jain appeared as a coffee-swilling, rapid-talking dervish, who fancied himself an Internet pioneer. His eyes would light up as he spewed his ideas one after another.
Jain admirers call him a genius. Software engineer Kevin Marcus, one of InfoSpace's earliest employees, described him as "one charismatic dude" who had "this ambitious, passionate flair about him that radiated out."
"You didn't know what it was, but you wanted to be part of it."
At the end of staff meetings, software engineer Jean-Remy Facq recalled getting so carried away with Jain's cause that Facq would jump up, shake his fist in the air and cry, "World domination!"
Detractors describe Jain as dishonest and ruthless.
At least two men with whom Jain had dealings said he threatened them.
Dan Kranzler, an InfoSpace investor who left in early 1998, had a bitter dispute with Jain when he demanded that Kranzler return stock options, potentially worth several million dollars if InfoSpace ever went public. After Kranzler refused, Jain called Kranzler's home at night and said, "I will destroy your family," according to a Bellevue police report.
Jain admitted to police that he said those words but said that he didn't really mean it, the police report shows.
Another Jain business associate, Greg Crane, alleged in a lawsuit that Jain threatened him with "bodily harm" if he filed a lawsuit over a business dispute. It was 1998 and Jain was angry that a lawsuit might interfere with InfoSpace's public offering, Crane said in the lawsuit.
Last-minute crisis
Jain later told reporters he would have "put a bullet through my head" if he hadn't turned InfoSpace into a successful public company. At the time, it was tiny, unprofitable and offered a hodgepodge of online phone books, stock quotes and horoscopes.
With 7.5 million personal shares, Jain would have a jackpot worth at least $110 million when InfoSpace made its Wall Street debut. InfoSpace's rank and file expected to become instant millionaires, too.
But less than two weeks before InfoSpace's December 1998 public offering, a crisis threatened to scuttle Jain's crowning achievement.
Boston businessman G. Kent Plunkett said Jain wrongfully fired him after a few days on the job as vice president and cheated him out of millions of dollars in promised stock options.
Jain insisted he had never hired Plunkett or promised him anything. But when Plunkett produced an agreement signed by Jain and threatened to sue, InfoSpace's board was concerned.
By law, InfoSpace and its underwriters could not sell the stock to the public without fully revealing its risks. What other surprises might be out there?
Company lawyers searched Jain's home computer, read his e-mails, scoured his office files and interviewed employees about business deals or promises Jain may have made.
They quickly turned up evidence that Jain may have failed to give promised stock options to seven former employees and a consultant. Lawyers also found eight potential lawsuits over contract disputes with business partners.
With his credibility damaged, Jain might have lost his job or had the public offering derailed. The board of directors, which has a legal duty to protect shareholders, could have reconsidered asking investors to sink money into a risky company with a reckless CEO.
But key players had jackpots waiting as well. Investment bankers, led by the firm Hambrecht & Quist, had $6 million in fees riding on the offering. Two directors on InfoSpace's board owned part of the company after sinking $4.5 million in venture capital. One of them, Rufus Lumry III, an early key executive of McCaw Cellular and part owner of the Seattle Mariners, held stock he eventually sold for $85 million.
The directors, along with Hambrecht & Quist and InfoSpace's outside auditor, Deloitte & Touche, agreed to an unusual plan so they could charge ahead.
Nobody knew whether Jain's shoot-from-the-hip deal making would lead to other lawsuits. So the board forced Jain to set aside 1 million shares of his personal stock as insurance against future claims. The company agreed to pay for known claims such as Plunkett's.
"There was such a rush to put this out — did anybody in the room have an interest in protecting shareholders?" asked Michael Lofing, a financial expert at the research firm Glass Lewis & Co.
InfoSpace made its Wall Street debut Dec. 15, 1998. Employees watched as the stock, priced at $15, closed at $20. InfoSpace, half owned by Jain and his wife, was suddenly worth at least $400 million. InfoSpace's first employees were each worth about $2 million.
Of the $78 million InfoSpace raised that day after expenses, $10.5 million would eventually go to paying off Plunkett's claim.
Meanwhile, InfoSpace stock started its dizzying climb, doubling in the first two weeks.
Special Projects Index
A Seattle Times investigation · by David Heath and Sharon Chan · March 6-8, 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dot-Con Job home
Part 1: Dubious deals
Taking investors for a ride
Mansions, cars, yachts
Who won, who lost
Part 2: Cashing out
Insiders flee
Part 3: The aftermath
A former SEC lawyer helps
Documents kept secret
InfoSpace now
Documents
About this series
STOCK TIMELINE
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Part 1: Dubious Deals
Dot-con job: How InfoSpace took its investors for a ride
© 2005, The Seattle Times
By David Heath and Sharon Pian Chan / Seattle Times staff reporters
MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES, 2003
Naveen Jain, the charismatic, energetic force behind InfoSpace, was ousted by the dot-com four years after taking it public. Undaunted, he founded his next firm, Intelius, across the street from InfoSpace's Bellevue headquarters. Here, he plays in his office in the early days of Intelius.
Five years ago this week, at the height of the dot-com stock frenzy, a young Bellevue company called InfoSpace was worth more than Boeing.
Wall Street analysts hailed the startup, which promised to bring the Internet to everyone's cellphone, as "a new Microsoft," and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, as a visionary.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had hundreds of millions invested. Small investors such as Bev Hess, a real-estate agent in Phillips, Neb., poured their retirement savings into what appeared to be a sure bet.
At its peak, InfoSpace was the Northwest's biggest Internet business, worth more than $31 billion. Jain, a man obsessed with being more successful than Bill Gates, was himself worth $8 billion. He bought a palatial waterfront home in Medina down the street from his idol and another nearby on Mercer Island, along with two yachts and a piece of the Seattle SuperSonics.
What Paul Allen, Bev Hess and hundreds of other shareholders didn't know was this: InfoSpace's success was an illusion, created by lies and deception.
Jain and other InfoSpace executives deceived the public by making the company appear far more successful than it was, a Seattle Times investigation has found.
The investigation — built on internal company e-mails, confidential documents filed in court and scores of interviews — found that Jain and others created the illusion of revenues with accounting tricks and dubious deals.
One e-mail from a venture capitalist to Jain captures the nature of the deals. The man refused to participate in an investment that Jain had proposed, bluntly telling Jain that if he did so, "I believe that I could go to jail."
The Times' investigation found:
• InfoSpace officials misled Wall Street and the public about how their company was doing, concealing that revenues were falling far short of expectations.
• Much of InfoSpace's reported revenue came from "lazy Susan" deals, whereby company officials invested in other firms that turned around and gave back the same money.
• Wall Street analysts, including famed dot-com guru Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch, privately expressed grave concerns about InfoSpace while at the same time publicly touting its stock. In a private e-mail to colleagues, Blodget asked, "Is this really a world-class company, or just a world-class storyteller?" Soon after, he gave InfoSpace stock his highest rating.
• While investors clamored to buy InfoSpace's highly touted stock, company insiders were unloading it. Two executives later angled to get around trading restrictions by asking for demotions to sell stock before its value evaporated.
Jain himself accused several of his top executives of engaging in illegal insider trading by misleading shareholders and then dumping their stock.
When the game was up, the investors took a beating. Stock worth $1,000 in March 2000 was worth only $2.67 by June 2002. The company once worth more than Boeing fell to the value of two Boeing 777s.
Allen lost an estimated $400 million when InfoSpace shares collapsed. Hess, 65, saw her $40,000 investment shrink to $1,450.
"I scrimped and saved for 42 years, and I feel that I have been duped out of my hard-earned money," she said.
Hess explained that she plunged into InfoSpace after reading glowing reports from stock analysts and media accounts of Jain and InfoSpace. "I feel like the American public was lied to," she said.
At its peak, InfoSpace alone accounted for about a third of the $100 billion in stock value created by the Puget Sound area's 20 publicly traded dot-coms. The company played a major role in the region's dot-com boom, which produced legions of young, overnight millionaires and defined an era.
Most of that wealth seemed to have been the product of a speculative stock-market bubble. However, the inside story of InfoSpace shows that, at least in this case, investors were manipulated.
The system did little to protect them. A shareholder sued InfoSpace for misleading investors, but a King County judge handling the case kept thousands of pages of damaging documents from investors who claimed they were wronged.
Rather than investigate Jain for misconduct, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission aided Jain in court after he hired a prominent former SEC lawyer to lobby the agency.
InfoSpace today appears to be a far different company. Jain and other key players are gone. The board hired James Voelker as chief executive two years ago because "they wanted to go in a new direction," Voelker said.
The real story behind InfoSpace's rise and fall comes to light now because The Seattle Times recently won a two-year legal battle that went up to the state Supreme Court. The high court's decision led to the release in October of thousands of pages of records that had been sealed in a shareholder lawsuit.
The documents, along with scores of interviews and other records, offer a rare, uncensored look into the inner workings of what was once considered one of the most successful dot-coms on Wall Street.
A drive to succeed
Naveen Jain grew up in a culture mired in bribery and corruption, yet in a religion that deplores dishonesty.
Born in 1959, Jain lived in villages throughout Uttar Pradesh, one of India's largest and least literate provinces. His family takes its name from their religion, Jainism, whose followers take vows to abstain from stealing, violence and telling lies.
Jain's father, a civil engineer for the public-works department, fervently followed these beliefs, said Atul Jain, Naveen's younger brother. Their father, at risk to his life, defied the local custom of taking bribes. Atul Jain said his father sometimes had to be escorted by a bodyguard.
The Jains lived in small rental homes with running water and electricity. Naveen Jain, however, wanted a different life and admired business leaders who "built so much from nothing." He earned a degree in engineering from Indian Institutes of Technology, a highly competitive university.
Jain came to the United States as a young man through a business-exchange program and in 1989 joined Microsoft, run by "my absolute role model," Bill Gates.
Jain had modest success at Microsoft and was working on Microsoft Network when a seismic event rocked the Internet world on Aug. 9, 1995. Netscape Communications, maker of the popular Internet browser, began selling its stock to the public. The company had made not a dime in profit but ended the day worth $2.2 billion.
Netscape's spectacular stock run-up marked the beginning of the dot-com era: No longer did companies, particularly Internet startups, have to show a few years of profit before Wall Street would consider offering their stock to the public.
Jain watched the dot-com explosion from the Microsoft Network (MSN), which was having a chaotic and disappointing launch.
In March 1996, he quit and started InfoSpace. His plan all along was to take his new company public as soon as possible. Jain and six employees, most of them ex-Microsoft workers, began building online e-mail and telephone directories that would generate revenue from ads.
INTERVIEWS JANUARY 2003
Listen to Naveen Jain talk about the InfoSpace culture, his best deal, lessons learned and more.
His enthusiasm for the Internet and his drive to succeed were infectious. Jain appeared as a coffee-swilling, rapid-talking dervish, who fancied himself an Internet pioneer. His eyes would light up as he spewed his ideas one after another.
Jain admirers call him a genius. Software engineer Kevin Marcus, one of InfoSpace's earliest employees, described him as "one charismatic dude" who had "this ambitious, passionate flair about him that radiated out."
"You didn't know what it was, but you wanted to be part of it."
At the end of staff meetings, software engineer Jean-Remy Facq recalled getting so carried away with Jain's cause that Facq would jump up, shake his fist in the air and cry, "World domination!"
Detractors describe Jain as dishonest and ruthless.
At least two men with whom Jain had dealings said he threatened them.
Dan Kranzler, an InfoSpace investor who left in early 1998, had a bitter dispute with Jain when he demanded that Kranzler return stock options, potentially worth several million dollars if InfoSpace ever went public. After Kranzler refused, Jain called Kranzler's home at night and said, "I will destroy your family," according to a Bellevue police report.
Jain admitted to police that he said those words but said that he didn't really mean it, the police report shows.
Another Jain business associate, Greg Crane, alleged in a lawsuit that Jain threatened him with "bodily harm" if he filed a lawsuit over a business dispute. It was 1998 and Jain was angry that a lawsuit might interfere with InfoSpace's public offering, Crane said in the lawsuit.
Last-minute crisis
Jain later told reporters he would have "put a bullet through my head" if he hadn't turned InfoSpace into a successful public company. At the time, it was tiny, unprofitable and offered a hodgepodge of online phone books, stock quotes and horoscopes.
With 7.5 million personal shares, Jain would have a jackpot worth at least $110 million when InfoSpace made its Wall Street debut. InfoSpace's rank and file expected to become instant millionaires, too.
But less than two weeks before InfoSpace's December 1998 public offering, a crisis threatened to scuttle Jain's crowning achievement.
Boston businessman G. Kent Plunkett said Jain wrongfully fired him after a few days on the job as vice president and cheated him out of millions of dollars in promised stock options.
Jain insisted he had never hired Plunkett or promised him anything. But when Plunkett produced an agreement signed by Jain and threatened to sue, InfoSpace's board was concerned.
By law, InfoSpace and its underwriters could not sell the stock to the public without fully revealing its risks. What other surprises might be out there?
Company lawyers searched Jain's home computer, read his e-mails, scoured his office files and interviewed employees about business deals or promises Jain may have made.
They quickly turned up evidence that Jain may have failed to give promised stock options to seven former employees and a consultant. Lawyers also found eight potential lawsuits over contract disputes with business partners.
With his credibility damaged, Jain might have lost his job or had the public offering derailed. The board of directors, which has a legal duty to protect shareholders, could have reconsidered asking investors to sink money into a risky company with a reckless CEO.
But key players had jackpots waiting as well. Investment bankers, led by the firm Hambrecht & Quist, had $6 million in fees riding on the offering. Two directors on InfoSpace's board owned part of the company after sinking $4.5 million in venture capital. One of them, Rufus Lumry III, an early key executive of McCaw Cellular and part owner of the Seattle Mariners, held stock he eventually sold for $85 million.
The directors, along with Hambrecht & Quist and InfoSpace's outside auditor, Deloitte & Touche, agreed to an unusual plan so they could charge ahead.
Nobody knew whether Jain's shoot-from-the-hip deal making would lead to other lawsuits. So the board forced Jain to set aside 1 million shares of his personal stock as insurance against future claims. The company agreed to pay for known claims such as Plunkett's.
"There was such a rush to put this out — did anybody in the room have an interest in protecting shareholders?" asked Michael Lofing, a financial expert at the research firm Glass Lewis & Co.
InfoSpace made its Wall Street debut Dec. 15, 1998. Employees watched as the stock, priced at $15, closed at $20. InfoSpace, half owned by Jain and his wife, was suddenly worth at least $400 million. InfoSpace's first employees were each worth about $2 million.
Of the $78 million InfoSpace raised that day after expenses, $10.5 million would eventually go to paying off Plunkett's claim.
Meanwhile, InfoSpace stock started its dizzying climb, doubling in the first two weeks.
Easy money
Within a year of going public, Jain realized that making money from charging for ads on its Web sites was a long slog with limited potential for growth. Then he came upon a simple idea that he believed had a colossal future: What if InfoSpace offered the same content — weather reports and stock quotes — to cellphone users, charging them a monthly fee?
Jain finally had a business that people could understand: the Web in your pocket. InfoSpace was no longer just another dot-com. It was the pioneer of the wireless Internet.
With contagious fervor, Jain promised investors that the wireless Internet would change the way people communicated, shopped, worked and even the way they lived.
There will soon be a billion cellphones in the world, he predicted, and InfoSpace would get $1 to $3 per subscriber per month. "You do the math — that's a [expletive] load of money," he said.
Analysts bought the concept and gushed over InfoSpace's prospects. An analyst from US Bancorp Piper Jaffray even proclaimed, "A new Microsoft is born." Fueled by hype, InfoSpace's stock went stratospheric, soaring 1,300 percent in just five months.
"Unacceptable" news
BARRY WONG / THE SEATTLE TIMES, FEBRUARY 2000
InfoSpace founder Naveen Jain tells employees about the company's acquisition of Saraide, a Canadian wireless Internet company that soon would prove to be a multimillion-dollar disappointment.
Then in early March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst and InfoSpace's stock went into a freefall. On April 20, 2000, InfoSpace's finance director sent an alarming e-mail to Jain about wireless Internet revenues. It warned of a disaster with a Canadian wireless Internet company they had just bought, Saraide.
Saraide was backing away from its promise to bring in $31 million from Europe that year, InfoSpace finance director Garth MacLeod had just learned. Instead it would come up with only $12 million — a devastating $19 million shortfall for a company expecting $106 million in revenues for the year.
"This is totally unacceptable," MacLeod wrote to Jain. The shortfall "makes it extremely difficult" for InfoSpace "to beat the Street."
Beating Wall Street's predictions on revenue or earnings growth was paramount. Exceed it by a cent or two and the stock could soar. Miss it by even a penny a share and the stock would get trampled.
"This is not good," Jain wrote back. "How do we fix it?"
If word got out about InfoSpace's $19 million shortfall, the news could further devastate the company's stock.
Within four days of MacLeod's dire e-mail, Jain talked to a stock analyst at Merrill Lynch who wanted to advise Merrill Lynch clients about InfoSpace's financial prospects.
The analyst didn't know it, but InfoSpace had just sliced $10 million out of its revenue projection for 2000, reducing it to $96 million.
Jain had to be careful with what he said to the analyst. Giving deliberately misleading information about a public company is securities fraud.
After talking to Jain, analyst Sofia Ghachem wrote an e-mail to her colleague Henry Blodget: "Naveen saying we won't be embarrassed if we go out on a limb for results." InfoSpace's financial picture was rosier, not gloomier, than expected, she said Jain had told her.
Blodget, at age 34, was a superstar Internet analyst, beloved by the financial cable shows, who became famous when he accurately predicted Seattle's Amazon.com would reach an astonishing $400 a share. Blodget's recommendations on InfoSpace were weighty enough to move the stock price.
Privately, Blodget already had reservations about Jain and InfoSpace, asking a colleague in an e-mail just the week before, "Is this really a world-class company, or just a world-class storyteller?"
But on April 27, 2000, as Jain had urged, Blodget went out on a limb. He boosted his own estimate of InfoSpace's annual revenue by 18 percent and gave the stock his strongest buy rating. Analysts at other companies announced similar projections the same day.
This burst of renewed optimism about InfoSpace stopped the stock from tumbling and even pushed it up that day from $63 to a closing price of $72.
The bump in the stock price that Thursday put extra money in Jain's pockets. The following Monday, he sold 220,000 shares at $68.75 a share for a total of $15.1 million. The misguided euphoria over expected revenue growth had increased Jain's gains by at least $1.2 million.
Jain's sales posed some risk. Selling stock based on significant information that hasn't been disclosed to the public is illegal.
Other insiders sold in the ensuing weeks. Also selling stock were chief accounting officer Tammy Halstead and Ellen Alben, vice president of legal and business affairs; both were included in an e-mail warning of Saraide's shortfall, records show. In all, InfoSpace insiders sold $158 million in stock from May to July 2000.
(Part 1 Cont'd ) |
