The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has slapped eight former AOL executives with civil law suits alleging that they used illegal accountancy practices and measures deliberately to falsely inflate online advertising revenue figures by more than US$1 billion way back in 2001/2002.
Among those so charged are the company's one-time chief financial officers John Michael Kelly and Joseph Ripp, as well as other executives and senior managers.
Four of those charged have already agreed to settle with the SEC in the sum of $8 million. By so doing at this early stage they can get away with neither admitting nor denying that the allegations against them have any substance. Instead, observers are asked to believe that they are stumping up the cash (in the case of David Colburn, AOL's erstwhile head of business affairs, this figure is a tidy $4 million) because they feel some sort of sudden moral compunction to do so even thought they claim to be not guilty of any wrongdoing.
The SEC lawsuits filed in a federal court in Manhattan, allege that the former AOL executives "knowingly or recklessly engineered, oversaw and executed a scheme to artificially and materially inflate the company's reported online advertising revenue."
The mills of the SEC grind slow but exceeding small.
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