California: lJury Awards Compound Simon's Woes

Mercury News ^ | 8/1/02 | Dion Nissenbaum

[NormsRevenge]

In a decision certain to damage Bill Simon's gubernatorial campaign, a Los Angeles jury on Wednesday ordered his firm to pay $65 million for defrauding and destroying a pay phone company.

The award marks the culmination of a case that put the Republican Simon's business practices on trial and provided Democratic Gov. Gray Davis with critical ammunition to attack his challenger.

[NormsRevenge]

Simon had sued Hindelang for concealing his criminal record from the investors, but those claims were rejected in court.

There is a parallel here with Davi$ as well. He has been concealing a lot of things too!

[goldstategop]

The Mercury News and the California liberal pressitutes are beginning the smear campaign against Bill Simon portraying him as a crooked businessman. You heard it here first on FR.

[eureka!]

Yup. They have one goal: get Simon's negatives (before people get to know him) on a par with those of Grayout....

[onedoug]

Simon was, is and probably always be a scion with a sense of entitlement. But at least he doesn't appear to be a communist, where Davis and his nest of reds has got to be rooted from CA state government. So how's this for one of the biggest nose-holding elections ever? Phew!

[goldstategop]

OK, so Simon's not a saint. But don't look to the media to reveal GrayDown's corruption the way they're exposing Simon's flaws. After all, GrayDown is a liberal and he's also a Rat and will get a pass. Simon is just going to have to grit his teeth and campaign as though this jury announcement never happened.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Funny... back in 2000, when Bill Simon first crossed my radar screen, I did a little research and found the Hindelang episode. By then Hindelang had been fired, and the question in my mind was how the heck did he manage to make it past Simon & Sons' due-diligence process? It was obviously a very costly oversight... and now it's gone even more costly!

Well, it turned out that the due-diligence had been performed for Simon & Sons by Deloitte & Touche. Interesting... a friend who is an (exceptional!) business-intelligence researcher found tons on Hindelang in the public record in a few minutes, but D&T had managed to miss it all. IMHO Simon & Sons might have a case against D&T for their failure to find this stuff.

I'm trying to dig up the information again and will post any public-domain stuff as I can.

[Free the USA]

fyi

[goldstategop]

Paul Hindelang should never have won. In the present climate, a businessman's presumed guilty before he's deemed innocent and even if Simon had done nothing wrong, he still couldn't have won. The jury verdict will be set aside or overturned eventually but people are not going to hear from the media pressitutes that Simon's name was cleared. It just like the California justice system's perverse appreciation for irony that a drug smuggler gets to con a jury and leave a decent man holding the bag.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks!