by Lynne Huntting
Kevin Kalkhoven once again paid close attention and took notes during the eighth day of the civil jury trial in Oakland District Court.
The co-owner of the Champ Car World Series and of PKV Racing is one of four former executives of JDS Uniphase who are alleged to have committed violations of the securities and exchange commission - including insider trading.
The company itself is also one of the defendants in the class action lawsuit where groups of share holders have said the company was misleading and not forthright in its statements and information about the optical fibres components company.
Thursday, Dr. Scott David Hakala, director of CBIZ Valuation Group, was the main witness. His company does, among other things, full corporate business appraisals, and evaluates parts or all of businesses and companies including assets and good will. He has fifteen years of experience and has previously testified as an expert witness in court cases including a jury trial.
Afterwards, Dr. Hakala told me that he worked on the Enron case, and it was his unattributed data which led to the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay. On this JDSU case Dr. Hakala estimated he and his staff spent 800-1000 hours. He said “We're considered efficient in the field” saying that other companies could take twice as much time to prepare such data. Dr. Hakala also said it was difficult preparing the information in such a way or terms that it would be understandable to the jury.
Dr. Hakala's testimony, with many charts shown on the big screen called demonstratives, covered his Event Study Analysis done on JDSU and its stocks. It was very comprehensive and detailed. Such an analysis tries to isolate what market changes can be explained by news specific to a company versus news about the market in general, or just news. The analysis identifies news events which are relevant to the case, including false or allegedly misleading news from a company.
