Embattled Utah CEO vindicated

• Published in: Deseret news (Salt Lake City, Utah : 1964)
• Main Author: Jenny Anderson New York Times News Service
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Salt Lake City, Utah Deseret Digital Media 26.03.2006
• ISSN: 0745-4724

Indeed, soon after the SEC sued TenFold, Kennedy's software development company, along with him and three other executives in 2002 for accounting and disclosure issues, the company and its board of directors quickly settled. By the fall of 2005, two of the three executives named with Kennedy had also chosen to settle, and charges against the third were dropped. When the SEC decided not to take its case against Kennedy to trial, those settlements were scrapped. Even Kennedy's oldest daughter, Anne, got a taste of the acrimony when she was 21. When she joked to a friend at Brigham Young University that maybe they had all learned not to invest at the height of a stock market bubble, the friend retorted, "Or we all learned not to trust Annie's dad." In the five years since he left [TenFold], Kennedy got only one formal job offer -- from TenFold. In 2002, Bennett asked him to return. "[Gary D. Kennedy] was a hard-driving sales manager who people loved," Bennett said. But Kennedy was not interested. On Nov. 18, 2002, almost two years after Kennedy left TenFold, the SEC sued the company, Kennedy and three other company executives. It said they had improperly accelerated the booking of some revenue to make the company appear profitable right before it sold shares to the public. The SEC also accused the company and its executives of concealing the company's tendency to miss deadlines for major software projects.