By: John Gray

In addition to stuffing his “Nuremburg file,” Eckstein actively kept informtion from Drabinsky and Gottlieb, the defence argues. In one instance Tony Fiorino testified that Eckstein told him to remove improper transfers to the company’s fixed assets from budget-to-actual reports circulated to senior managers. “The key information was buried at Eckstein’s direction,” the defence argues. “Eckstein was clearly keeping Drabinsky and Gottlieb ‘out of the loop’ about the improper transer to fixed assets, completely contrary to a top-down conspiracy to commit fraud.”

Um, alright. But Brian Greenspan argued in his final summation that the budget-to-actual process wasn’t that important in the fraud. In fact, he criticizes prosecutors for not making a clear distinction between the year end financial meetings that Gottlieb supposedly attended on an “as-needed basis,” and the budget-to-actual process that Gottlieb was deeply involved in.