ABSTRACT
Over the past two years a number of companies in the telecommunications sector have justly earned the sobriquet 'infamous', but, despite the fierce competition, WorldCom must be considered the most infamous of all. What is particularly interesting about this is that WorldCom was for many years held up as a shining star in the telecommunications firmament - the proverbial 'new kid on the block' who successfully set out to show oldfashioned incumbents such as AT&T how to do business in a fast-moving, data-centric world. Ordinarily, we would be able to trace the story through the financial data, but in this case we have a problem: on 25 June 2002, WorldCom announced that it would be restating its 2001 and first-quarter 2002 financial statements and that previous versions could not be relied upon.^ To put the matter bluntly, executives at WorldCom had been fiddling the books and the company was bankrupt. Precisely who the perpetrators were, and the true extent of their involvement, is now a matter for the courts, and may not be fully unravelled before this book is published. However, this in no way detracts from a fascinating story that, were it not entirely true, might have won awards as fiction.
