Directorships are the golden ticket in the world of the business elite. You attend maybe 10 meetings a year, sign whatever’s put in front of you, typically get paid $3-4K a pop, and do it over again half a dozen times or more for various companies. It’s a gravy train for managers past their use by date. But customers and shareholders have to trust what directors sign off on.
So, it’s good to see the Lombard directors being held to account for signing off on statements that were untrue. If you paid me $4,000 per meeting and were asking me to lend my name, and in Doug Graham’s case his prestige, to the reputation of your firm, I would know those documents intimately. I would want to double-check every fact. For $4,000 per meeting, that’s the kind of service the shareholders and customers deserve.
Liam Dann sums it up:
His crime – and these are criminal convictions with the potential for a jail term – is that he did not take the role seriously enough.
He signed up to a set of promises to investors and then failed to ensure those promises were kept.
Graham won’t go to jail as a ordinary person would if their actions had cost other millions of dollars through laziness or carelessness. Jail is for the poor. The elite still get treated with kid gloves in our justice system. But this case is a start. Let’s see more of the business elite swing for pocketing the money and letting the people who trusted them pick up the pieces when it all goes to crap.
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