Common Sense Prevails on Dick Grasso

An appellate panel of the New York State Supreme Court has thrown out the longstanding litigation aimed at forcing Dick Grasso to cough up all the money he extracted from the New York Stock Exchange. I've long felt that while Grasso was greedy, he earned his money by keeping the NYSE antiquated -- a goal ardently desired by his constituency.

Besides, it struck me and many others as an odd use of public reasources for the New York State Attorney General to pursue a case on behalf of the millionaire seatholders of the NYSE. The court more or less agreed, in a decision that hinged on the fact that the NYSE is now a public company.

The decision can be found here. The relevant language is as follows:

Here, the Attorney General is using public funds out of appropriations to his office to prosecute causes of action on behalf of an entity that is no longer a not-for-profit corporation and seeks only a money judgment that would benefit the owners of the for-profit entity into which the not-for-profit has been converted (even if the judgment nominally would be paid to the not-for-profit corporation). The Attorney General's continued prosecution of these causes of action, as is clear from People v Ingersoll and People v Lowe, vindicates no public purpose

No public purpose except advancing the career of Eliot Spitzer, and we know what happened with him.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.