Corporate malfeasance
From 4 January 2006 until its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Mercury Interactive was traded via the Pink Sheets as a result of being delisted from the NASDAQ due to noncompliance with filing requirements.[16] On 3 January 2006, Mercury missed a second deadline for restating its financials, leading to the delisting.
Three top executives resigned in November 2005 after a special committee at the company found that they benefited from a program to favorably price option grants. The committee found that, beginning in 1995, there were 49 instances in which the stated date of a stock option grant was different from the date on which the option appeared to have been granted. In almost every case, the price on the actual date was higher than the price on the stated grant date.[17] A former Chief Financial Officer, Sharlene Abrams, later associated with the financial misreporting, had resigned previously in November 2001.[18]
The Chief Executive Officer, Amnon Landan, also was found to have misreported personal stock option exercise dates to increase his profit on transactions three times between 1998 and 2001. In addition, a $1 million loan to Landan in 1999—which was repaid—did not appear to have been approved in advance by the Board of Directors and was referred to in some of the company's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but was not clearly disclosed.[19] In 2007, the SEC filed civil fraud charges against Landan, Smith, Skaer and Abrams. Without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, Mercury Interactive agreed to pay a $28 million civil penalty to settle the Commission's charges in 2007.[20]
The SEC settled charges against Sharlene Abrams in March 2009. Abrams agreed to pay $2,287,914 in disgorgement, of which $1,498,822 represented the "in-the-money" benefit from her exercise of backdated option grants, and a $425,000 civil penalty.[21] In September 2009, a federal judge dismissed all charges brought by the SEC against Susan Skaer, who now goes by the name Susan Skaer Tanner.[22]
