OWCP described his job in part of being the US Country Representative, with a responsibility to correctly represent and help management steer the company.

This is similar to the Dot-Com era when companies allocated pre-IPO shares to 'independent' market analysts, who never revealed this affiliation in their reporting. --THE regulators investigating Wall Street firms' allocation of hot initial public offerings are likely to discover some juicy material. As they examine the records, they will find that many top executives of telecommunications companies, including Bernard J. Ebbers, founder of WorldCom, and Joseph P. Nacchio, former chief executive of Qwest Communications, received I.P.O. shares of upstart companies -- like Juniper Networks -- that had won, or later would win, contracts to sell equipment or services to the big telecom concerns.

At Salomon Smith Barney, Jack B. Grubman, its embattled telecommunications analyst, decided which executives received the shares his firm was underwriting, according to David Chacon, a former broker in the firm's Los Angeles office, and another former Salomon employee with firsthand knowledge of the arrangements. Philip L. Spartis, a former broker who handled the WorldCom employees' stock option plan in Salomon's Atlanta office, also said Salomon had offered sweetheart allocations to several titans of telecom.

Sad to see it happen again, but great to see the SEC is protecting the investors.