A Rerun for Ex-TV Guide Executive

It's a long-running corporate saga, but there's a new chapter for Henry C. Yuen, former chairman and chief executive officer of Gemstar-TV Guide International. He has been indicted (again) on a felony charge of obstructing a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into accounting irregularities at the company, which was partly owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

If Yuen's plight sounds familiar, it's because three years ago he made a pre-indictment agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to a felony charge -- for the same accusations of obstructing the commission's investigation into whether he had inflated the company's revenue to meet financial targets.

The plea deal didn't pass muster with the judge, who heeded objections from both the S.E.C. and Gemstar. The deal that fell through would have given Yuen six months of home confinement as part of a two-year probation, and required him to donate $1 million to charities representing low-income victims of fraud and pay an additional $250,000 fine.

But the S.E.C. didn't back off, and pursued Yuen's indictment, which was brought by prosecutors last week and announced Friday. His attorney did not return a call for comment. The last several years have been a major change in fortunes for Yuen, who helped invent VCR Plus, a patented system for programming videocassette recorders.

Things were rosy at Gemstar when Murdoch, in 1999, acquired TV Guide for $9.2 billion in stock. But just three years later, in 2002, the company took a $6 billion write-down, which was an embarrassing hit for Murdoch's empire.

Since his ouster the following year, Yuen has been battling the government -- and Murdoch. Gemstar earlier this month merged with digital home entertainment company Macrovision Solutions Corp., in Santa Clara, California.

Last year, Yuen lost his bid to recoup $30 million that Gemstar froze when he was fired. Murdoch had tried to get Yuen to return about $100 million, including the $2 million annual salary his severance agreement provided. The arbitrator ruled that Yuen owed Gemstar $93.6 million in damages, salary and other costs.

Yuen's securities troubles stem from S.E.C. charges that when it issued the subpoena requiring Yuen to produce documents, he deleted them from his computer. Securities regulators said that he also ran a program on his computer to make it impossible to recover the deleted documents.

The Commission alleged that from June 1999 to September 2002, Yuen participated in Gemstar's fraudulent overstatement of revenues by at least $248 million to meet the company's ambitious financial projections.

After a December 2005 trial, the court found Yuen had committed securities fraud and ordered him to pay more than $22 million in restitution, penalties and interest.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling last month, noting "the weight of the evidence was well beyond the amount needed to support the district court's findings and conclusions that Yuen intended to manipulate Gemstar's accounting and thereby defraud the market."

by Elizabeth Olson