Martin Lukes Goes to Jail

My father is always criticizing me for not reading the Atlanta newspaper and keeping up with the local news. I blame it on the fact that I grew up here in the eighties. My memories of local news coverage run something along the lines of "Atlanta Zoo initiates program where local children can come and 'Watch TV with (local gorilla) Willie B'." Lately, my hometown and the surrounding 'burbs (OTP) have proven nationally newsworthy with such diverse personages and events as the Mansion Madam, the Runaway Bride and the Michael Vick dog-fighting charges.

Nevertheless, it never occurred to me that I would pick up the pages of the Financial Times, that daily broadsheet of the dismal science, and realize that I had missed out on the daily goings on of a juicy trial taking place in my own back yard. Today, I was introduced to "the great chief leader" of Atlanta-based multi-national a-b global, the iconic thought leader and world-class communicator, who re-defined management thinking with his foundational concepts: creovative(tm) and integethical(tm).

According to the FT, Mr. Lukes has just been sentenced to 2 years and three months in federal prison on three counts of insider trading, which he will likely serve in FCI Coleman, a correctional complex in central Florida.

Comments

Juha Lindfors said…
Indeed, it is exciting to see Atlanta on the international scene ;-)

Apparently the tens of thousand of USD worth of jewelery was still successfully argued by the lawyers to be a legitimate business expense.

I've yet to figure out how that works.
January 25, 2008 at 3:06:00 AM PST
Anonymous said…
Your post was so straight I wonder if you know that Martin Lukes is fictional. The entire FT is in on it and they decided to do the entire coverage straight even though he doesn't exist.

The columnist seems to want to end it and went out with a bang.

I've been following it for years, but you can get a quick summary on Wikipedia.
January 25, 2008 at 3:22:00 AM PST
Nathalie said…
Sad, but true, I was completely taken in by the entire spread (never saw it before today) to the point of emailing my real-estate agent:

"Virginia, have you ever heard of this Martin Lukes fellow? Ex-CEO of a-b global and resides in Atlanta. Wonder where he lives and if they'll be selling the house for a deal, now that he's off to prison."

Only in googling a-b global did I get hep to the jive. This is my favorite summary from KW Schreiter on Amazon.com:

"Lucy Kellaway's fictional 'Martin Lukes' character is the delightfully vapid, narcissistic director of marketing at a-b global who appears in Thursday editions of London's Financial Times newspaper.... Instead of doing actual work, Martin flatters superiors, flirts with personal assistants and offers unsolicited self-promotion to everyone. He hires CoachworX! for an Executive Bronze Life Coaching Program to 'achieve performance levels that are 22.5 percent better than the very best I can be.'
a-b global's CEO gives a speech to staff and investors from a golf course as the share price plummets and signs his e-mails 'I love you all'. The firm spends over $20 million on Project Rebrand and hires 12 rebranding consultants from Beyond the Box, but eventually obtains its new name from employee suggestions generated during a corporate 'on line jamming session'. Martin then spearheads the ill-fated Project Boxer Shorts to publicly donate obsolete corporate apparel featuring the old logo to homeless shelters."

All the bestest,
Nathalie
(willing to admit when she's taken in by a good story)
January 25, 2008 at 5:32:00 AM PST
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
April 12, 2009 at 9:56:00 AM PDT
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thug vs Thug: Porsche 1, Hedge Funds: 0

The latest drama is fun. VW became the largest company in the world, in terms of market cap, ahead of EXXON on a little financial market coup d'etat orchestrated by Porsche. Apparently VW stocks was on the way down, I don't know the details but many Hedge Funds (HF) were short the position. Fine. The price goes down. Porsche starts buying the anonymous float (and probably some private too?), but the point is they build a 73% market share without many people noticing. In the US you would need disclosure after 10% or so. Point is, that many HF wake up and realize that their short position is about to lose a lot of money. So what do they do? those idiots? they short cover all together, which means they buy the stock to cover the short. The stock zooms up, by a full multiplier and overtakes EXXON. Porsche makes A KILLING in the process and has robbed the city robbers to the tune of "potentially $30B". Not bad for a days worth of work. PS: hey, psst Porsche! With t
Read more

Love ya 2 PTB!

Jules: I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way. -- Pulp Fiction Jonathan Schwartz has this wonderful quote about me in a recent interview 15 minutes with the great man : Q:Turning to MySQL, how long do you think it will take before MySQL is fully integrated into Sun? We saw with Red Hat and its JBoss acquisition that this can be a slow, laborious process.... A: First, the personalities involved. Let's just say that integrating Marten Mickos into a company might be easier than assimilating a few of the JBoss personalities. Marten is a joy to work with and will make this integration work. I got to hand it to you Jonathan. You hit the nail on the head. JBoss was full of prima donnas, a lot of them actually; it drove me nuts. My developers were bitching all day long, my executives were even bigger fat cats, my sales guys were testosterone freaks. Even the receptionist had an att
Read more

Madrid Blog--We get sued

Image
...for having children If you are a foreigner and move to Madrid, do not, necessarily expect a warm welcome. Yesterday, we, or rather Don Mark Fleury and Dona Natali Manson ***note to Building Association of Serrrano XX, before you lawyer up, do your research. My husband spells his name "Marc" with a "c." and my first name is spelled "Nathalie;" not to mention that my honest English stone mason forbears would cringe at the misspelling of their last name to confound with that of the notorious 20th century serial killer. received an official communication from the Juzgado de Primera Instancia de Madrid, from one Don Ramiro Blah Blah, President of the Building Association of Serrano XX, a building of exactly 12 units, half of which were owned at one time by his father in law, in which it is alleged 1) "Mark Fleury and Natali Manson" have four children 2) these children own bicycles 3)and roller skates 4) and scooters ( Nathalie comment: nope sorry
Read more