The Securities and Exchange Commission has levied a $3 million penalty against Charles Johnson Jr., the former CEO of PurchasePro, a now-defunct business-to-business online exchange company that was involved in an accounting fraud case with AOL.
Johnson received a nine-year prison sentence in November 2008 for stock fraud and obstruction of justice and was also ordered at the time to pay restitution of $9.7 million.
The company was accused of giving away stock to its partners to inflate revenues in the fourth quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001 and making secret side deals with AOL, which had a marketing partnership with the company. PurchasePro was also accused of conspiring with AOL to overstate the revenue from software licenses that AOL sold for PurchasePro, and of backdating contracts to meet revenue projections.
On Tuesday, Judge Gladys Kessler entered a final judgment against Johnson that imposed a civil monetary penalty of $3 million and permanently barred him from acting as an officer or director of a publicly traded company.
