Birmingham Blues

Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, is suing the company for more than $70 million. This after he oversaw massive fraud at the company, screwing employees and shareholders in the process, and then played the religion and race cards to get acquitted — he and his wife started their own TV show so they could have public prayer meetings with Roy Moore and with various local black ministers, portraying poor Richard as a persecuted Christian good ol’ boy.

He and his attorneys managed to convince a jury that he knew nothing about the fraud that almost bankrupted HealthSouth, so now he thinks HealthSouth should honor his employment contract. He doesn’t give a f*ck about the people who lost their jobs or their retirement income. He just wants to maintain his lavish lifestyle. And he probably needs money to cover his legal fees — he still faces civil suits related to the fraud and more criminal charges (bribery and conspiracy) for attempting to influence the decisions of the Alabama Certificate of Need review board.

So what if Scrushy was acquitted? His defense was ignorance — he didn’t know that one chief financial officer after another was conspiring to falsify financial statements. Surely HealthSouth would be within its rights to fire a CEO who was that stupid.

I hope the judge laughs this one out of court.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 8:58 am and is filed under Scrushy Watch, What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.