Former McKesson chairman gets 10-year sentence
The former chairman of health care giant McKesson Corp. has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and fined $1 million for his role in a securities fraud that cost shareholders $8.6 billion in 1999.
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Charles McCall, 65, of Delray Beach, Fla., was convicted by a San Francisco federal jury in November of five felonies for inflating the revenues of HBO & Co., a medical software company, before McKesson acquired it for $13.9 billion in January 1999.
He was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who ordered him to turn himself in on March 31 and denied bail during a planned defense appeal.
McCall had been HBOC’s chief executive before the acquisition and became chairman of the merged company, then called McKessonHBOC.
Federal prosecutors said McCall and other HBOC executives pumped up the Georgia-based software company’s sales and revenue by more than $100 million, starting in early 1998, to make it more attractive for a takeover.
They allegedly backdated contracts and recorded revenue from sales that had not been completed, sent side letters to customers allowing them to back out of the contracts, and concealed those arrangements from HBOC’s independent auditors.
When the fraud came to light in April 1999, McKesson’s stock lost 48 percent of its value in a single trading session, one of the largest one-day plunges in Wall Street history. The company fired McCall two months later.
Prosecutors have not claimed any wrongdoing by San Francisco-based McKesson, the nation’s largest wholesale seller of pharmaceuticals.
A jury at McCall’s first trial in 2006 acquitted him of conspiring with other HBOC executives to defraud investors but deadlocked on the remaining charges, which were retried last fall.
HBOC’s former general counsel, Jay Lapine, who was tried along with McCall, was acquitted of all charges at his retrial last year. Four other former executives, including former HBOC President Albert Bergonzi, the company’s chief financial officer, pleaded guilty.
In court filings, McCall’s lawyers said he played “a minimal role, at most” in the fraud and had sold none of his own stock at the inflated value. They argued for a sentence of less than four years. Prosecutors asked for 15 years.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page DC – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle