Drabinsky goes down.

brocko said:
Conrad has to be sitting in his cell laughing his ass off............Greenspan gets rich his clients get jail.

Actually, didn't Connie get off on the two most serious charges?
 
stang said:
I'm sure they'll now put on a lovely performance in the big house.

Brings the play/movie "The Producers" to mind. Zero Mostel would have made a great Garth.

jwm
 
Was watching the news on TV and someone used a baseball analogy. Both baseball players and businessmen cheat. Baseball players cheat using steroids and businessmen use accounting tricks.
 
About Greespan, yes last high profile client in jail and another on his way but if they didn't have him it would've been more years and yes he did get Conrad a lighter sentence. Imagine how he feels, playing poker and you already know the guy next to you already has 3 aces and you have a pair. What are the odds of you winning?.
 
If they can't accept responsibility and at least pretend to show some remorse, fuck them.
Throw the book at them.

I wouldn't be surprised it they only get a 2-3 year sentence. :rolleyes:

I wonder what they would be looking at in the US.
10+ years?
 
I have a couple of questions???...

Why did take Canadian authorities 11 years to bring this to trial and get a conviction?It took the Americans half that time to convict Conrad and look how quickly they handled Enron.
Secondly,when is the last time Eddie Greenspan actually won a case???
 
beenthere123 said:
About Greespan, yes last high profile client in jail and another on his way but if they didn't have him it would've been more years and yes he did get Conrad a lighter sentence. Imagine how he feels, playing poker and you already know the guy next to you already has 3 aces and you have a pair. What are the odds of you winning?.


You know someone is guilty as hell if they hire Eddie.
 
Drabinsky is a crook

Op-ed from Today's Globe.

Got to love the quote from his 'henchman'... "these are the real #$%# numbers."

Wonder if the poor whistleblower they sued for libel and forced to apologize for saying their numbers were wrong in 2005 has any recourse thirteen years later.

Globeinvestor Gold e-EditionGlobeArchivesPricing | Membership |

Garth Drabinsky is a crook March 26, 2009 By MARGARET WENTE
At last we can report, without fear of being chilled by multimillion-dollar libel suits, what a lot of people figured out a long time ago: Garth Drabinsky is a crook.

His fabulous theatrical empire, Livent Inc., was built on fraud. And now the giant chandelier has finally crashed down on his head.

"I feel vindicated," says Alex Winch, who had a front-row seat in the courtroom yesterday. "It's just unfortunate that it took 13½ years to get the verdict."

In 1995, Mr. Winch, then a Toronto investment analyst, wrote a letter to Forbes magazine saying that Livent's accounting was far more aggressive than the company said it was. He was promptly slapped with a $10-million libel suit, which he chose to settle rather than face ruin. He was forced to run public apologies in major newspapers, and was banned for three years from making any comment on the company. By the time the ban ran out, the company had blown up.

Even today, Garth Drabinsky is often described as the greatest impresario of our times - the man who reinvented theatre. He won Tony awards and dined with presidents. By the mid-1990s, Livent's productions accounted for 20 per cent of the North American box office - or so it claimed.

But it was a lie.

He and Myron Gottlieb cooked the books from the very start. They took kickbacks, and manipulated the grosses to make the shows look more profitable than they really were. They were always short of cash and so, to raise more money, they had to lie. Some of Livent's accountants had a running joke about being fitted up for pinstripe suits - because they'd all likely go to jail.

In his own mind, Mr. Drabinsky justified it all. One day, the money really would come in, and nobody need ever know. In the drama of his own life, he had cast himself as the outsider - the man of humble origins who, as he wrote in his autobiography, "claw[ed] my way through the quagmire of business, merely to survive." As he saw it, all great producers had to take great risks. He called his book Closer to the Sun. The difference between himself and Icarus, he wrote, was that Icarus hadn't tried hard enough.

From the start, the Drabinsky defence was that he was far too busy with creative issues to know what was going on. The truth was that his henchman, Gordon Eckstein, made sure he knew the exact dimension of his lies. "What is this?" Mr. Drabinsky asked one day in 1997, when presented with a particularly dire report. "It's the fucking real numbers," Mr. Eckstein said.

Throughout his career, Mr. Drabinsky has used his remarkable force of personality to fend off scandals that would crush most men. He gained the admiration of legendary businessmen such as Jimmy Pattison and Conrad Black, who both sat on Livent's board. After the scandal broke, Lord Black declared that Mr. Drabinsky hadn't committed any crime, and even bankrolled his defence fund.

The fund must be seriously deflated now - along with the reputation of his lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, who has failed to get two star clients in a row off the hook. Mr. Drabinsky still faces enough lawsuits to last a lifetime, and must scrupulously avoid flying over American airspace, lest he be grounded and thrown in jail. It's almost tempting to see him as a tragic hero.

But Mr. Winch isn't making that mistake. As the great impresario plunged to Earth, he took a lot of people with him - and not just shareholders. "Think of the artists and musicians who never got paid," says Mr. Winch, who reckons that his whistle-blowing cost him around $350,000. "Think of the small theatre companies that struggled to compete with these mega-musicals that weren't founded on solid business but on fraud."

No, no one's going to make a musical of Garth Drabinksy's story. Because when all is said and done, he's just a crook.
 
It cost the whistlblower...

$350k out of his own pocket and now he is vindicated.

rafterman said:
Op-ed from Today's Globe.



Wonder if the poor whistleblower they sued for libel and forced to apologize for saying their numbers were wrong in 2005 has any recourse thirteen years later.
 
If the word "Putz" was in the dictionary a picture of Garth would appear below it.
 
great bear said:
If the word "Putz" was in the dictionary a picture of Garth would appear below it.




Jew think that one up by yourself, or do you have a team of writers?????:eek:








.
 
Throw the book at these remorseless lying assholes!!

I hope they get 10 years. :D

THE WITNESSES
14 people testified at the trial of Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb. Peter Small recaps what some of them said

GORDON ECKSTEIN

Livent's senior vice-president of finance and administration testified that Drabinsky and Gottlieb ordered him to falsify the books to make the company appear more profitable. "We would start off with a loss and make certain adjustments to end up with a profit." He said he prepared documents for his bosses clearly showing the real and fraudulent numbers so they could not later deny their role.
RAYMOND CHEONG

Livent's former IT manager testified he modified the firm's accounting program so staff could erase entries without leaving an audit trail. "A change was made to allow intercompany transactions to be unposted," he said. He agreed under cross-examination that Drabinsky and Gottlieb had no access to the computerized accounting system and couldn't use computers.

PETER KOFMAN

The engineering consultant for Livent testified he was persuaded to pay invoices to Gottlieb and Drabinsky for millions of dollars in services he never performed, recouping money by inflating his bills. Kofman said in 1997 he was asked to buy thousands of dollars in tickets for Livent's Ragtime production in L.A. His firm would later be repaid by billing the same amount.

GRANT MALCOLM

Livent's former production controller said his full-time job was hiding or misreporting expenses to boost the theatre production company's bottom line. He said he knew it was wrong. "I did what was expected of me." Livent accounting staff didn't think they would get caught, he said. "We believed the nature of the manipulations we were doing were for the most part undetectable."

ROBIN PULLEN

The former vice-president of administration for Echo Advertising said Eckstein asked him to cancel December 1994 bills worth $500,000 and reissue them the following year. He got a similar request for 1995. At first, he issued credit notes to Livent for the cancelled bills, but eventually Livent was heading off Echo's invoices before they were issued. "So there was no need to issue a credit note."

DIANE WINKFEIN

Livent's former corporate controller ensured the numbers presented to Livent's board of directors coincided with the false numbers in financial statements. She said Gottlieb "smirked and looked away" when she asked if he wanted her to lie to the new team taking over Livent about financial irregularities. She said she understood Drabinsky ran Livent and "very little happened without his ... approval."

MARIA MESSINA

Formerly an outside auditor, she was hired to be Livent's chief financial officer. She said she was unaware of the fraud at first, and when she found out she was paralyzed with fear of her two bosses, "men of power and money ..." It was a year before she could summon the courage to blow the whistle. She pleaded guilty in 1999 to the U.S. charge of making false statements about Livent's finances. She has still not been sentenced.

CHRIS CRAIB

He was an outside auditor before joining Livent to take charge of budgeting and forecasts. He said he attended a meeting on April 24, 1998, where Drabinsky and Eckstein made "completely arbitrary" changes to the financial records. The judge, however, concluded the meeting did not take place. Craib said he prepared executive summaries that clearly showed expenses improperly "rolled forward" into future quarters.

TONY FIORINO

Livent's former construction controller created bogus accounting categories in which to disguise production expenses as capital costs. He said he took his orders from Eckstein, who bullied staff and behaved as if he were omnipotent. He agreed he never discussed the improper accounting with Drabinsky and relied on Eckstein's word, largely, for his belief the theatre producer played a role in cooking the books.

ROY WAYMENT

The former operator of Execway Construction testified that in 1990 Drabinsky and Gottlieb's private company, King Commodity Services, would bill his company for tens of thousands of dollars in services and he in turn would invoice the executives.

"Myron's chauffeur would take a cheque to my office and my office would give the driver a cheque of equal amount made out to King Commodities."
 
The man cheated, just like those baseball players on steroids. He will not go into the Threatre Hall of Fame. He should go to jail, just like Conrad Black and Peter Puck.