Dapper Don and Dickie Bird Before the Dock Again!
Former Alabama governor and ex-HealthSouth chief indicted
What's so very interesting is the odd confluence of cases that intersects right at Doug Jones. Jones is Siegelman's attorney, and rightly got up and denounced all this in the most paid-spokesman fashion possible. However, he also is (or was as of a year ago) part of a class action civil suit against Scrushy (NOT part of the Fed's case against him). Here's what he said in a CBS interview in August of 2004 about the case against his current client's reputed co-conspirator--
[...] ”He benefited more than anybody from this fraud. There's no question about it. One hundred times fold,” says Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Birmingham who has filed a class action suit against Scrushy on behalf of his stockholders.
How did Scrushy make hundreds of millions of dollars from the fraud?
“In his stock options, his salaries, and his bonuses. And he has for years cultivated an image that ‘This is my company, I'm the one that brought this company up. I have my finger on the pulse. I know everything that's going on in this company. I know the numbers,’" says Jones.
“He doesn't have to be an accountant to direct this fraud. Other people may be the ones sitting up there late at night, crunching the numbers and cooking the books. But that doesn't mean that when he says ‘Fix it,’ if that's true, that he's not as much responsible for engineering that train wreck as anybody else.” [...]
It just seems like it makes it much harder to say your client's innocent, when he gets tied to someone you're suing for thievery.
It's going to be an interesting few months.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at October 27, 2005 09:21 AM