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.
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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.
