Remember our first (and last) “Enforcement Action, Oncology Edition” back in September 2008 where two cases in a span of two days prompted us to ask “which is worse — inducing shareholders to purchase $6.5 million of your company’s stock by falsely depicting the company as being on the verge of success curing cancer? Or defrauding a federal judge by falsely depicting yourself as having cancer such that you are so ill that you cannot participate in a potential SEC case against you?”
Well, the key player in the latter half of that question has now come clean. Howard P. Richman is the former executive of Biopure Corp. who was indicted in federal court in September 2008 on a charge of obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to a federal judge when he said he had Stage III colon-rectal cancer and could not participate in any depositions or other pretrial processes in a case the SEC was preparing to bring against him. The AP reports that after initially pleading not guilty, Richman changed his plea today to guilty, and admitted he had impersonated his own doctor as part of his lie to the court.
