Kozlowski, Swartz Will Do At Least 8 Years For Tyco Fraud

Kozlowski has also been ordered to repay $US167 million, while Swartz must repay $US72 million. Judge Obus said: “The crimes at issue here were violations of the defendants’ positions of trust and their fiduciary duty on a grand scale. They caused damage to Tyco and to others, including the shareholders who are Tyco’s owners and who, like the investing public, generally should be able to rely on the integrity of the management of publicly traded companies.” Kozlowski’s crimes includes having Tyco pay for a $US6000 shower curtain and part of a $US2 million birthday party in Sardinia for his wife. According to reports, he looked overwhelmed as the sentence was read while Swartz looked down at the floor. “It would be a mistake to confuse this (the sentencing) with leniency,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at McCarter & English. “For these two former executives, even several years in a state prison will be a very long stretch of time.” The 2 will be eligible for parole after eight years and four months, and could be put in a work-release program after serving at least six years, according to State Department of Correctional Services guidelines. Still, they may yet fare worse than their white-collar counterparts in federal prisons because New York generally requires that criminals with sentences longer than six years go to maximum-security prisons, to be mixed among men convicted of murder and other violent crimes. “It is worth repeating, as the jury panel was instructed at the outset, that this is not about any other case,” Judge Obus said. “This is not a matter in which the fraudulent distortion of the records reflecting the financial health of the company have been shown to have been so distorted as to precipitate the company’s collapse. That apparently is some other case, perhaps more than one other case, but that is not the case that was before us here.” In explaining why he did not give the maximum sentence, Judge Obus cited the letters (from supporters presented to the court) and said: “I think the letters are genuinely sincere and they show aspects of the defendants’ lives that are at odds with the conduct which has brought them before this court. “They certainly make it all the more difficult to fully grasp, even with hindsight, how the defendants, with all they had going for them, managed to get themselves into this disastrous position, but that is what they have done.”