Henry Samueli is on a roll.
Last month, the National Hockey League reinstated him as the owner of the Anaheim Ducks, as Clockwork informed you.
This afternoon, a federal judge set aside the Broadcom
Corp. co-founder's guilty pleas and dismissed the criminal charges
against him–the same charges that caused the NHL to remove Samueli as the Ducks owner in the first place.
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Samueli pleaded guilty in June 2008 to lying to the Securities and
Exchange Commission about his involvement with the granting of
backdated stock options to Broadcom employees.
But after hearing him testify in the criminal accounting fraud trial of Broadcom's
former chief financial officer William J. Ruehle,
U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney told Samueli, “I am going to set aside your guilty plea and I am going to dismiss
your information against you. I have looked at
the plea agreement. I have listened to your testimony and you didn't
make a false material statement.”
The Corona del Mar resident, whose net worth Forbes pegged at $2.3 billion in 2007, sounded as elated as he must've been when the Ducks won the Stanley Cup that same year.
According to Rachanee Srisavasdi's recap in the Orange County Register, Samueli responded, “You have restored my faith in the criminal justice system. . . . Thank you your Honor.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.