Bernard Ebbers left a wreck behind when the telecoms giant collapsed with its stock price in 2002, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, in New York.

Mr Bernie Ebbers was in sparkling form when he appeared at the National Press Club in Washington on January 12th, 2000. The head of MCI WorldCom, who liked to preside over board meetings in blue jeans and cowboy boots, started by hamming up his image as a country boy.

"You don't know what's it like to leave the farm with cow manure on your boots and have to put this miserable suit on to come to the big city," he said to polite laughter from the appreciative audience of journalists.

This, after all, was the man who had created a colossal telecommunications company which, at $160 billion (€122.7 billion), was worth more than the GDP of Sierra Leone, Armenia and Mongolia combined. He had made countless investors rich by increasing the stock value of WorldCom by an average of 54 per cent a year from 1989 through a series of audacious acquisitions.

He owned a 21,000-acre plantation in Louisiana, a quarter of a million acres of farmland in Mississippi, half a million acres in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi and a half million-acre ranch in British Columbia, the largest in Canada.

When he boasted to the journalists that "$100 dollars invested in MCI WorldCom in 1989 would be worth $7,240 today", Mr Larry Lipman, the club's president, commented ruefully: "How many people in the room are kicking themselves?"

Just over two years later the investors in WorldCom were the ones who were kicking themselves, unless they had got out. As the internet bubble deflated, WorldCom found it could not meet its sales targets. The company's 80,000 staff, including 200 based in Dublin, received a memo from Mr Ebbers assuring them it was not in danger of bankruptcy. But shortly afterwards it went belly-up in the biggest bankruptcy and corporate accounting scandal in corporate history.

This week Mr Ebbers (63) went on trial in New York accused of orchestrating an $11 billion accounting fraud to keep stock prices artificially high. The company was found to have moved figures from expenses into other accounts to make the revenue numbers look better.

Even as he boasted to the business journalists at the National Press Club, WorldCom stock was on the way down from its peak of $64.50 a share and would never recover.

This week the first witness for the prosecution, former MCI executive Mr Douglas Webster, explained the psychology that he found at WorldCom. It was like the movie Field of Dreams, where a baseball pitch is situated on a remote farm on the principle of "build it and they will come", he said. WorldCom built the networks, "but nobody came".

As the stock price tumbled in 2002, Mr Ebbers told his chief financial officer, Mr Scott Sullivan, "we have to hit the numbers", according to prosecutor Mr David Anders this week. That, Mr Anders told the jury, was an instruction to cook the books.

Mr Ebbers's lawyer Mr Reid Weingarten, argued that there was nothing "dirty" about trying to make the numbers, as that was what public companies did.

Mr Ebbers has always protested that he was ignorant of the subterfuge. "No one will find me to have knowingly committed fraud," he told the congregation at the Easthaven Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Mississippi, where he now teaches Bible.

He was, in effect, claiming to be so dumb that he was incapable of following the company's intricate accounting. His lawyer backed this up by citing conference calls with analysts when the WorldCom chief executive would pass a question to Mr Sullivan saying: "Remember, I'm a PE graduate, not an economist."

Mr Sullivan has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud, and by testifying against his boss will likely get a lighter sentence.

The classic fall back for chief executives in trouble - that they are visionaries who simply push subordinates to get better performances - is also being used in another high-profile corporate scandal which came to court this week in Alabama. It involves Mr Richard Scrushy, former chief of HealthSouth, a giant healthcare company. His chief financial officer, Mr Aaron Beam, testified that when he told Mr Scrushy they would not meet Wall Street expectations, the chief executive replied: "You guys need to fix the numbers", following which the "guys" worked out a formula to overstate HealthSouth earnings by $2.7 billion.

While they portray their chief executive clients as naive innocents, the defence lawyers try to shred the reputation of the villainous subordinates. Mr Scrushy's lawyers have mauled Mr Beam in court and Mr Ebbers's lawyers are planning to reveal Mr Sullivan's "marital infidelities".

Whatever happens, Mr Ebbers is a broken man. He emerged from the debacle with more than $300 million in debts. The former WorldCom chief has had to sell off his land holdings apart from a measly quarter of a million acres in Mississippi. He has given up his jeans for a suit again for his trial, where he faces a maximum 85-year sentence.

His legacy is also a struggling, debt-ridden telecommunications industry and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the sweeping reform legislation passed by a shocked Congress after WorldCom collapsed. His legacy too is the misery of investors and thousands of employees who lost their jobs, savings and pensions.