What will Bill Say?

You have to wonder what Nortel CEO Bill Owens will say today when he speaks at Scotia Capital's Institutional Lunch in Toronto. One would hope for his sake that Owens doesn't say “our restated results will be out next week, I guarantee it” because that's what he said last month at an investment conference, and we all know what happened. Owens may be well intentioned but anything he says about the “business” will ring hollow until Nortel puts out its restated results from 2000 to the first half of 2003. How can you take anything Owens says seriously if you've got no idea of whether Nortel's results are legit? There have been some suggestions Nortel's restated results will only see minor adjustments, relatively speaking, but regardless of whether that is accurate or not, something was terribly wrong with Nortel's financial system that made things look much better than they really were. If Nortel's senior executives – Roth, Dunn, Chandran, etc. – didn't take walk away with so much cash during the go-go days of the telecom boom, then you could have said everyone felt the pain. But when John Roth pulls in $135-million from exercising stock options in 2000, you know something's wrong in the state of Nortel.