Fergie's Tech Blog

AOL Fraud Prosecutors Stop Short Of the Top

Carrie Johnson writes in The Washington Post:

One of the government's most highly touted accounting-fraud investigations -- into questionable advertising deals at America Online Inc. around the time it merged with Time Warner Inc. -- has apparently hit a dead end, running into the five-year statute of limitations before prosecutors could move as far as they had hoped up the company's corporate ladder.

Despite a lengthy investigation by the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, lawyers involved in the case now say the government will not be able to bring criminal charges against top AOL executives over transactions in which the Dulles Internet service provider and its business partners allegedly sought to artificially boost each other's revenue numbers as the dot-com bubble was bursting in 2000 and 2001.

posted by Fergie @ 10/22/2006 03:57:00 PM