MediaFile

Indicted Broadcom Corp co-founder Henry Nicholas III on Monday asked the federal judge presiding over his upcoming stock options backdating and drug possession trials to let him travel to Mexican holiday spot Cabo San Lucas with his family for the July 4 holiday weekend, court documents showed.

Prosecutors and guarantors of Nicholas’ $3.3 million bail had no objection to the plan for Nicholas to leave the United States on Friday and return on July 8, the documents showed.

Nicholas’ bail conditions bar him from leaving the continental United States without court permission and call for drug testing, home detention and electronic monitoring. His attorney, James Riddet, said Nicholas will not fly “or have possession of his personal airplane during this trip”.

Nicholas and Broadcom’s former CFO William Ruehle have pleaded not guilty to a 21-count indictment that accuses them of scheming to backdate millions of stock options and to falsify docuemnts to further the fraud from 1999 to 2005.

The case was one of the biggest stock options backdating scandals among many that rocked corporate America when they began surfacing in 2006.

It’s been less than a week since Google reset the price of employee stock options in order to provide “better incentives for employees to remain at Google.”

Apparently Google’s President of Americas Operations Tim Armstrong didn’t get the memo.

On Thursday, Time Warner announced that Armstrong is leaving the Googleplex to take the top job as CEO of AOL.

No one likes to see their company’s stock drop. But employees and executives at Google were probably not overly distraught to see their stock close Friday at $308.57, down 19 percent since Feb. 9.

That’s because Friday’s close is the price that Google will use to reset employee stock options, according to the terms of its controversial option exchange program. Google announced the plan in January, explaining that 85 percent of its workers’ stock options were underwater, meaning that the price to exercise the option was below the current market price -– a fact which isn’t too surprising, given that Google’s stock peaked at $747.24 in November 2007.

Google is among several companies, including Starbucks and Advanced Micro Devices, that are repricing stock options in order to keep morale in the ranks up and to retain talent that might otherwise be lured by greener pastures. Of course, investors, who don’t enjoy the benefit of repricing the shares they purchased, are less fond of such option exchange programs. And the $400 million charge that Google estimates will be incurred as a result of its option exchange is further salt in the wounds to shareholders.