Top Ten Individuals We Won’t Miss from 2008

In addition to its list of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics for 2008, Ethisphere also published a list of the Top Ten Individual We Won’t Miss from 2008.

  1. Bernard Madoff
  2. David Colby – Colby was the former CFO of Wellpoint who was caught carrying on multiple affairs on the side, even once texting “ABORT!!” to one of his many girlfriend’s after discovering she was pregnant. He carried on relationships with over 30 women and proposed to at least 12 of them.
  3. Rod Blagojevich
  4. Heinz-Joachim Neubürger, Karl-Hermann Baumann, and Johannes Feldmayer – The two former CFOs and former Chairman of Siemens, respectively.
  5. Ted Stevens – the Senator from Alaska who was found guilty of failing to report gifts given to him by various contractors.
  6. Bruno A. Kaelin – a former senior vice president and head of corporate compliance at Alstom, arrested in Switzerland in August 2008 for a joint Franco-Swiss-Italian investigation for his alleged role in running a bribery slush fund and laundering hundreds of millions of euros.
  7. Adam Vitale – Vitale was sentenced to 30 months in prison and $180,000 restitution to be paid to AOL after he found a way to spam 1.2 million AOL users in a way that avoided being caught by AOL’s spam filter.
  8. Robert Rubin – Rubin, like it or not, became one of the faces tied to the 2008 financial crisis. His position of deregulation when he was Treasury Secretary is now faulted by some for many of the problems of today. He also became the fall guy for Citigroup’s business strategy of leveraging more risk.
  9. Marco Benatti – Benatti was a former Italian director of advertising for WPP. Benatti, who was accused of libel last year for calling WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell a “mad dwarf,” was alleged to have secretly pocketed millions of pounds from a deal he helped to broker. WPP’s lawyers, claiming up to ₤12.5 million for breach of “fiduciary duty,” alleged at a court hearing in London that Benatti was the “secret beneficiary” of most of the proceeds from a ₤17 million takeover of Media Club, an Italian advertising company.
  10. James M. DiBlasio – DeBlasio makes the list for going on a three day bender and hacking into the computers of his company, Ski.com, while drunk.

Author: Doug Cornelius

You can find out more about Doug on the About Doug page

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