Global, 3 Execs Settle With SEC

U.S. market regulators said Monday that they had settled allegations against Global Crossing Ltd. and three former executives, ending a three-year investigation of the company’s financial reports from 2001.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it had issued cease-and-desist orders against the company and the executives, former Chief Executive Thomas Casey, former Chief Accounting Officer Joseph Perrone and former Chief Financial Officer Dan Cohrs, who also agreed to each pay a $100,000 fine.

Neither the company nor the officers admitted wrongdoing.

Global Crossing, which built an intercontinental network of undersea fiber-optic cable in the 1990s and was based in Beverly Hills at the time, has been the target of an investigation since February 2002. After the Internet boom fizzled, the company collapsed in 2002 with $12.4 billion in debt and questions about its accounting practices.

The SEC inquiry involved “reciprocal transactions” in which Global Crossing agreed to swap network capacity with other companies. The SEC said Global Crossing did not reveal to investors the full scope of the transactions, which were key to meeting analysts’ estimates for the first two quarters of 2001.