"On May 31, 2007, the Commission charged Abrams and three other former senior Mercury officers with perpetrating a fraudulent and deceptive scheme from 1997 to 2005 to award themselves and other Mercury employees undisclosed, secret compensation by backdating stock option grants and failing to record hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation expense. The Commission's complaint alleges that during this period certain of these executives, including Abrams, backdated stock option exercises, made fraudulent disclosures concerning Mercury's "backlog" of sales revenues to manage its reported earnings, and structured fraudulent loans for option exercises by overseas employees to avoid recording expenses." -- http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm
"Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment against Abrams in 2008 for income tax evasion and aiding in the preparation of false tax returns." -- http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/09/mercury-plea-idUSN...
Calling these "mistakes" is highly disingenuous.