Prosecution calls ex-Worldcom chief a liar

NEW YORK - Former WorldCom Inc. Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers violated the trust of investors who lost billions of dollars by choosing to repeatedly lie, a prosecutor charged on Tuesday as the fraud trial opened.

"What this case is really about is the choice Bernard Ebbers made in the fall of 2000," federal prosecutor David Anders told jurors in his opening statement at the trial.

Mr Anders said the former WorldCom CEO could either have confessed the company's financial results had sunk with the rest of the telecommunications industry -- or he could have hid the truth.

"Faced with that choice, Bernard Ebbers chose to lie. Not once, not twice, but again and again and again," Anders told 16 jurors who were sworn in earlier on Tuesday.

The 16-member pool will eventually be separated into 12 regular jurors and four alternates. Comprising 10 women and six men, the jury pool includes two teachers, a nurse, a housewife and three bank workers.

Ebbers' lead attorney is scheduled to make his opening statement later on Tuesday.

After that, the first witness in the case is due to testify, likely on Wednesday, for the government, which has charged Ebbers with securities fraud, conspiracy and lying to regulators.

In its case, the government will allege that Ebbers knew the company he built into a telecommunications power would not be able to meet financial targets it set during the technology boom in the late 1990s.

So, the government says, Ebbers orchestrated a fraud in 2000, ordering other executives to use questionable accounting to paint a rosier picture of the company's finances.

They charge that he lied to federal securities regulators as he cheated investors by misleading them about the health of the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2002 amid an US$11 billion ($16 billion) accounting scandal. It emerged last year using the name MCI.

Ebbers faces a maximum prison sentence of 85 years if convicted.

The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.

- REUTERS