Corporate criminal

Business Daily goes behind bars to meet the man who stole $400m. Regrets? he's got a few - like being found guilty. But does he think that what he did was wrong? Not quite.

One of the intriguing questions about the current slew of financial wrong-doing and dodgy deals is whether the culprits actually come to regret what they've done. Do they ever come to say that what they did was actually wrong?

To try to get inside the mind of a corporate criminal, we decided to go to talk to one. Dennis Kozlowski now sits in a prison cell in New York State for taking $400m from the share-holders of Tyco, the company he ran as chief executive.

Basically, he lived a lavish life-style on company money which he treated as his own. And when we say "lavish", the word doesn't quite do it justice.

There was the famous party for his wife on the island of Sardinia, complete with an ice sculpture that urinated vodka. It was all part of a corporate culture of excess that seemed acceptable to some at the time, though not, it transpired, to the law and to a jury.

Business Daily's Ed Butler went to visit him at the Mid State Correctional Institute.

When it comes to health risks, all the attention at the moment is on the swine flu that's erupting in different parts of the world - but, on any one day, about 6,000 people die from ordinary accidents and illnesses suffered just by going to work, a barely-noticed epidemic by any other name.

Which raises the question of how we evaluate risk. The authorities, for example, stock-pile medicines against all sorts of illnesses. In the case of the current flu outbreak, for example, Britain has already stock-piled enough of the relevant anti-virus medicine to cover half the population. Brazil, on the other hand, only stock-piled enough to cover 5%. It's a question of how you weigh possibilities against current alternative needs, like schools.

To explain the calculation of risk, Business Daily turned to Peter Sandman who advises US government agencies.