Leader: Fall guy Ebbers

His wife cried in court but few others will be sad to see ex-WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers go to prison. And it very much looks like that's where he'll spend most if not all of the rest of his life, following the guilty verdict handed down yesterday and sentencing, set for 13 June. He could get 85 years.

It's not that he was all that dislikeable - though some, including ex-staffers, will always have a problem with his control freak tendencies and outsiders with the aggression he exhibited. This writer, for one, always found him entertaining and a challenger to staid incumbent telcos in a number of parts of the world.

It's rather that we now know his and WorldCom's rise was built on false foundations. Sure, they captured a lot of custom, bought plenty of other players. But it was never near the success story everyone thought.

Remember, this was an $11bn accounting scandal. Eat your heart out Enron, Tyco, Parmalat and Martha Stewart. All that was left was for fingers of blame to be pointed.

Pundits have been arguing that nothing did more to contribute to the dot-com bubble and bust than Ebbers and his organisation's assertion that internet traffic was doubling every 100 days, back at the height of the boom.

The company's UUNet ISP subsidiary was going great guns. But quite that fast? History shows it wasn't. Other telcos are on record as saying they simply felt they had to keep up, that they were inadequate if they couldn't see a similar pick up in traffic.

Cue the incredible spend on equipment and glut in capacity. Cue the inevitable downturn.

So the thinking is that tens of thousands of jobs were lost due to the bust, which followed the boom, which in a large part was driven by one upstart company and its forceful boss.

There is logic to that.

Much as just-made-jobless traders from merchant bank Barings cheered the news rogue trader Nick Leeson had been captured after his deception a decade ago, so too can we imagine people jettisoned from the world of telecoms and tech waiting expectedly for that sentencing on 13 June.

No one wants this to happen again. We knew someone at WorldCom had to be to blame. Today, pending any likely appeal, it looks like a former high school basketball coach from Mississippi is the fall guy.