Bush: We'll jail fraudulent bosses

President George Bush will tell Wall Street today that business executives will be jailed if they are found to have deliberately misled investors by cooking company books.

In an effort to shore up crumbling confidence in corporate America, Mr Bush will warn that his administration will get tough with errant businesses in an effort to draw a line under a flurry of accounting scandals.

He is also likely to highlight proposals that American executives swear an oath to the accuracy of their company accounts, and to reinforce the overworked Securities Exchange Commission, which is investigating possible malfeasance at hundreds of US firms. Mr Bush, speaking at the White House last night, admitted that a growing list of multi-billion dollar company scandals, including Worldcom, Enron and Xerox, had "shaken confidence" in corporate America.

Investors, nervous that more scandals could derail a global economic recovery, have sent stock markets reeling to five-year lows. That has wiped hundreds of billions of pounds off pension fund values on both sides of the Atlantic and is hurting wallets and jobs in America, where Mr Bush faces mid-term elections in November.

Mr Bush's comments came as the two most senior executives of WorldCom, former chief executive Bernie Ebbers and former-chief financial officer Scott Sullivan, exercised their constitutional right to refuse to answer questions at an inquiry into how the company fraudulently overstated its profits by 3.8 billion dollars.

The Bush administration itself is under scrutiny from Democrats who want the president to open files relating to an 850,000-dollar sales of shares while he was a director of Harken Energy a decade ago. Mr Bush sold the shares, before the company reported heavy losses, and somehow delayed informing the Securities Exchange Commission.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, oil services group Halliburton, is being investigated for accounting irregularities while he was in charge of it in 1998.

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