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By Andrew Hill
Published: April 18 2011 22:59 | Last updated: April 18 2011 22:59
Nine years ago, when he was chief executive of Sprint, Bill Esrey told me how he and his team had strained to match WorldCom's impressive quarter-on-quarter profit growth. They could not, and they later found out why: Sprint's arch-rival had been inflating its income by manipulating its reserves in an $11bn fraud that dumped its chief executive Bernie Ebbers into jail and the company into bankruptcy protection.
It was a lesson in how the drive to meet the consensus quarterly earnings estimates of Wall Street analysts could have a malign influence even on companies that were not cooking their books.
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