Stock options take down two more execs: Cnet, McAfee CEOs quit
Cnet chairman and CEO Shelby Bonnie and McAfee boss George Samenuk resigned today, both victims of the stock options backdating scandal that is roiling the Valley. McAfee president Kevin Weiss was flat-out fired, the company said.
Both companies recently completed internal investigations of backdating from 1996 to 2003, The Washington Post reports.
"I apologize for the option-related problems that happened under my leadership," said Bonnie. Samenuk said he was retiring "in the best interests of the company, its shareholders and employees. I regret that some of the stock option problems . . . occurred on my watch."
Meanwhile the Times' Laurie Flynn writes that Apple's Fred Anderson may have lost his place at Apple to save Steve Jobs'. Anderson left after an Apple investigation found options problems from 1997-2003, a time when he served as CFO.
“I would say that Jobs and the Apple board threw Fred under the bus to keep it from hitting them,” said Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission and a managing director at Glass, Lewis & Company, which advises institutional investors on corporate governance.
Apple's disclosures left the financial community (and certainly the SEC) dissatisfied, Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant, said.
“You don’t know what the scope of the problem really is. They told you the number of grant dates, but not the number of grants. They told you that (Jobs) was in the know on a few instances, but those could be a huge number of shares....Mr. Foley questioned why the company had not yet quantified the potential impact for investors. “After three months, you don’t know what the number is,” he said. “Come on.”
And Reuters reports that Andrew McKelvey resigned as chairman and CEO of Monster Worldwide, the parent of Monster.com, saying he could “no longer dedicate the number of hours required” for the company’s review of its stock option grants.
“At this stage in my life, I simply can no longer dedicate the number of hours required by Monster’s rapid global growth and the additional demands of time associated with the ongoing historical stock option grant review."
The options review will prevent Monster from stating comparative quarterly results for the quarter ending Sept. 30, 2005.
