Business Channel 2007-01-26&28

（单词翻译）

Time for a corporate¹ crime update, and we begin this morning with Hewlett-Packard. Welcome back, everybody. 55 minutes past the hour. Let's get right to Ali Velshi, he is Minding Your Business this morning. Sadly, there's always lots to talk about on this front.

There is. I was, when you said that, that's why I sort of, I, I was thinking this, we can keep very busy with corporate crime updates. Ah, right, let's take you back to the HP pretexting case when we all learned about pretexting earlier in the summer. Well, there're five people charged, er, HP's former chair, Patricia Dunn, two company executives, two private eyes, they each face four felony counts. Well, yesterday, state prosecutors² offered them a deal, er, to replace the four felony count with one misdemeanor count. Now, all of them apparently³ have declined this deal. And, it, it's mixed as to why they've done that. In one case, one of the lawyers says "it's because my client didn't do anything wrong, and we're gonna follow this through". What the, the larger thinking seems to be is that there is federal, there are federal charges against these five and state charges and the lawyers are trying to get them all sort of wrapped into one so they can say, all right, let's cut one deal all around and walk away from the thing without a trial. It would probably be best for HP, and best for the, the defendants⁴ involved. But we will continue to follow that and see what happens.

Er, a lot of people, know the name HP, a lot of people know the name CVS, it's the nation's largest drugstore, by store count, at least. Now two former CVS executives have been indicted⁵ by a grand jury in Rhode Island, er, for allegedly, well, here's the charges, conspiracy⁶, bribery⁷ and 21 counts of fraud, er, allegedly for paying a state senator to kill legislation in the State Senate that CVS didn't like and to sponsor legislation that CVS did like. The company hasn't been charged, I should note, and the company says it is, er, it is cooperating with this investigation⁸. So we're yet to see what comes out of this, but er, a good old-fashioned who've done it, corporate case.


Vocabulary


misdemeanor n. In the United States and other countries where the legal system distinguishes between very serious crimes and less serious ones, a misdemeanour is a less serious crime.
She was charged with a misdemeanour, that of carrying a concealed⁹ weapon.