Mike Zafirovski can start at Nortel in two weeks after a deal
was worked out with Motorola. As expected, he will give back $11.5
million of a $16 million severance package (sweet!) and agree not to
poach any of Motorola's employees. The deal is a win-win all around.
Nortel gets the CEO it desperately needs, Mike Z. gets to be a CEO,
which he desperately wanted, and Motorola gets some cash back after
making life miserable for Nortel and Mike Z. for a few weeks. Nortel,
by the way, will release its third-quarter results on Wednesday. Orion Securities analyst Duncan Stewart
has come out with his first report on Nortel with an overweight
(speculative) rating and a 12-month target price of $4.50. “With a
shiny new chief executive officer and the expefcted Q4 budget flush, we
believe that Nortel is poised to do well in the very short term,” he
said to start the 30-page report. (Update:
I was remiss in not pointing out Stewart is decidedly down on Nortel in
the long-term. In particular, he believes Nortel is late to market in
many areas or unlikely to sell enough product to generate growth.)
How can they possibly be seen doing well losing all that business from BT, Cingular, Vorizon, BSNL, etc… over the last year. What nonsense… How?
Surely the aboriginal tribe in a mall order can't be doing it for them or their admittedly lost ventures. We see what their margins are by paying customers even more. How can they be doing well especially in the “very short term”. Why would Duncan at Orion say this, is he like R.W. Baird ? LOL
With their credibility and track record, I would not believe anyone supporting them with optimism. I do not believe it is the most credible equity in the world and they do not even have reliable numbers according to the auditors let alone the SEC who will fine them considerably for their fraud.
This fraud that caused a pensioning widow to telephone the class action lawyers uncontrollably crying in how she lost all the money she had and does not know what to do now, let alone the massive endless others suffering silently and chronically to Nortel's ongoing shameless actions that they arrogantly fight to perserve as we see from the insider pensions, severences, and bonuses under weak internal controls to boot.
They still have to refiancing debt, paying fines/lawsuits/legal fees, etc.,…or is this what he meant by short term.
I also can not see how hiring a disgruntled, passed by, axeman who settled a claim of contractual fraud that Nortel will pay for can save them. They can not afford to shrink further, even if the board did give him reign to do so. Gary was pessimistic after several months of investigating, how in the world can he be so sure before even starting? Perhaps the hype will drive it short term by a retention challneged and overly opportunistic market.
Long or short term, for the boat they are in, I fear this is just ongoing traditional fluff and hype. More very expensive advertising, like their failing ventures.
They should pay the defrauded first before paying $11.6B to another fraud. Since when have these finanglers ever done the right thing when they didn't make any money in the good times let alone now.
Needless to say, there are no terms in our dictionary strong enough, or words that would surely make a hardened criminal cowar, to express the extreme dissapointed in Nortel and the damage they have done =) …by the looks of things, everyone else like customers, suppliers, employees, regulating authorities, police, name it… feel the same way.
How can they be allowed to trade, why isn't the system moving faster to alleviate the pain of so many who supported them only to be robbed. What a crying shame… to be going on like this for so long, stalling, misleading, hiring frauds, having good people leave, while losing money yet paying bonuses only adds insult to injury in this ongoing saga and made in Canada Worldcom/Enron.