All together now: Mike Armstrong got shafted.
For many of his five years as CEO of AT&T, C. Michael Armstrong suffered blistering
criticism for the sluggish performance of the company's long-distance division.
Quarter after quarter, Wall Street slammed Armstrong's financial performance
compared with rival companies.
And who was his biggest rival? WorldCom Inc. Yes, the parent of MCI, where
executives, as it turns out, were cooking the books like Emeril.
"Since 1999, they perpetrated $9 billion worth of fraud," said Armstrong, who
became chairman of the board of Comcast Corp. last week. "Why was I getting bad
press? Because they were comparing the performance of AT&T to WorldCom's
fraud. Their revenues were false, margins were false, their costs were false.
All of a sudden, it comes out, it's a big fricking fraud." So he's a little
annoyed.
