Choicepoint's biggest screwup

We all know by now that Choicepoint allowed some highly respectable Nigerian businessmen of impeccable credentials to view hundreds of thousands of customer records for entirely legitimate purposes -- they were paying customers, after all, and The Customer is Always Right. But even after that huge mistake -- or rather, because of it -- the company's top executives began dumping shares like mad. What's scary is that since they started selling, the stock's down about 5%. Clearly, they were expecting lots more damage. These insider sales were certainly stupid, and probably criminal (though the legal proof may be hard to come by) but the solution is easy enough: They need to buy stock from the company itself, at some premium to the prices at which they sold -- they'll have the same stake as before, the shareholders would have gotten their money back (since the premium goes to the company, which is owned by the shareholders), and there's no need to disrupt their business by taking the matter to court.

Or, if you want to do things the SEC's way, you could 1) Hire a bunch of lawyers with the company's (shareholders') money, 2) Hire a legion of PR firms to explain away that frivolous spending, 3) Hire a new accountant to magically turn that spending into an investment amortizable over twenty years, and 4) Settle out-of-court by having the execs give the SEC some pittance (for which they'll likely be compensated by the company) and a statement that "We neither admit nor deny that we did what you claim, but we'll never do it again." Thank God for the SEC -- they've practically made it a shareholder's utopia, here.