Extraordinary Circumstances The Journey Of A Corporate Whistleblower – Cynthia Cooper

Charles pushes for a different strategy. “I believed the only way we could be a final survivor was to buy one of the Baby Bell companies” that own the last mile, Charles will say. “Bernie said, ‘You’re probably right, but it will take us three years to get it done.’ The Bells were regulated monopolies. There were too many regulatory hurdles.”

Charles repeat¬ edly urges Bernie not to buy Sprint and reminds him that Washington regulators specifically told him [Bernie] after the MCI deal that they wouldn’t approve another acquisition of a large long-distance company. “Bernie wouldn’t listen. He said, ‘We’re doing this deal. The Sprint lawyers tell me we can get this done.’

” In October, Bernie offers $127 billion for Sprint, dwarfing the MCI purchase and astounding Wall Street. If he manages to make this happen, it will, once again, be the largest acquisition incorporate history. In addition to the FCC, the deal must be approved by the Department of Justice and the European Union because both companies operate in Europe. “When we made the offer for Sprint, Bernie told me, ‘This will make us bigger than AT&T,’ ” Charles will recall.

“I think there was a lot of ego involved in us buying Sprint.” A Double-Edged Sword The thing that has helped me personally is that I don’t understand a lot of what goes on in this industry. —Bernie Ebbers It’s January, 2000. After more than a decade at WorldCom, my boss Charles is calling it quits.

He’s had enough. After years of long hours and one acquisition after another, he’s burned out. But it’s more than that. Bernie is becoming increasingly difficult. “I love the guy,” Charles will tell me, “but it’s like the old saying—you can love somebody but that doesn’t mean you can live with them.” The camaraderie that once existed in the executive suite has faded.

w u LKJ U Lnl Former Vice President, W Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/extraordinarycirOOOOcoop I Extraordinary Circumstances The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower Cynthia Cooper WILEY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This book is printed on acid-free paper. (0) Copyright © 2008 by Cynthia Cooper. All rights reserved.

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4. WorldCom (Firm)—Corrupt practices. 1. Title.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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