Nortel trial focuses on ‘optics’ of bonus payments

In the wake of the acquittals of three former senior Nortel Networks executives, the biggest threat to CEOs, senior managers, employees and shareholders in the brave new world of corporate governance may be the company’s board of directors. Pilloried in the past for doing too little at the whiff of potential trouble, boards now increasingly overreach and do so with impunity, even if means destroying a company.

Former Nortel Networks Corp chief executive Frank Dunn and two other senior financial executives engineered a loss in the final quarter of 2002, then artificially swung the company to back-to-back profits the Crown said

An order from former Nortel chief Frank Dunn to senior accountant Brian Harrison to prop up the telecom giant’s reported earnings is a fallacy conjured up by Crown prosecutors, the ex-CEO’s defence counsel said

OTTAWA — Three Ottawa-area teenage girls befriended other teens on the Internet and then forced them to work as “escorts,” a court was told Monday. The three accused teens recruited or attempted to recruit teenage girls from Ottawa through Facebook or other social media, Crown prosecutor Julien Lalonde told youth court on the opening day of what is expected to be a month-long trial.

A defence lawyer for former Nortel CEO Frank Dunn clashed with a company auditor Thursday over whether Nortel sought to conceal accounting reserves that padded profits and triggered bonus payments.

A former finance employee of Nortel Networks Corp.