Seeking
to mirror its aggressive pursuit of executives
on Wall Street, the Justice Department is putting
a new focus on Silicon Valley, pursuing managers
of the technology boom who are suspected of crossing
the line into securities fraud and insider trading.
The
United States attorney here is under pressure from
Washington to mount prosecutions swiftly. The effort
was punctuated last month by the indictment last
month of Phillip E. White, the former chief executive
of Informix, a database company that was based in
Menlo Park, Calif., and has since been bought by
I.B.M. Prosecutors assert that the company lied about
its revenue, leading it to inflate the value of its
stock by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The
government has also brought charges or received convictions
in the last year against executives or employees
at least nine high-technology companies, including
Critical Path, the e-mail network company.
But
as federal law enforcement officials increase their
scrutiny here, Valley executives say the effort may
be more political than practical. And they say the
government is unlikely to find extensive fraud at
the Valley's most well-known firms -- the equivalent
of Enron or WorldCom -- but will instead make examples
of smaller entrepreneurs. |
