Lawmakers applauded when president george W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill into law on July 30, 2002, ushering in a postscandal crackdown aimed at curbing the kind of self-dealing and conflicts of interest that brought down Enron, WorldCom and other giants. One day earlier executives at Crescent Real Estate Equities of Fort Worth, Tex. were busy trying to blunt the Sarbanes-Oxley, among other things, bans company loans to executives and extending the terms of existing loans. Crescent previously had lent $26 million to its chief executive, John Goff, and $9 million more to half a dozen insiders, to buy shares in Crescent. So Crescent, a real estate investment trust, extended the payback deadline by ten years. Myriad companies made similar moves in the weeks before the signing ceremony. Electronic Arts gave a $4 million loan to Warren Jenson, its chief financial officer, admitting in a filing it was doing so a month prior to "the prohibition on loans to executive officers." Reebok International gave a $300,000 relocation loan to then-executive Martin Coles. Wyeth, the drugmaker, handed a $250,000 relocation loan to a division president, Ulf Wiinberg.
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