Public Intelligence

Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $5 trillion in annual revenues and nearly 10 million employees. Member companies comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock markets and pay nearly half of all corporate income taxes paid to the federal government. Annually, they return $133 billion in dividends to shareholders and the economy.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it filed today an enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan, a resident of Kuwait, and three related foreign entities for engaging in an illicit scheme through which they reaped millions of dollars in profits from trading around hoax offers to acquire U.S. companies. The SEC obtained an emergency court order to freeze more than $5 million in trading profits that it has located in various accounts in their names.

Sidney Harman was born in 1919. He attended Baruch College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1939. In 1953, Harman and Bernard Kardon founded Harman/Kardon, Inc. Both Harman and Kardon were engineers by training and had worked at the Bogen Company, which was then the top manufacturer of public address systems. Their collaboration helped to create the high-fidelity audio industry. As early as 1954, the company simplified access to high-fidelity sound for the non technical consumer with the introduction of the world’s first true hi-fi receiver, the Festival D1000. This product incorporated a tuner, control unit and power amplifier in a single chassis. Four years later, Harman Kardon presented the world’s first stereo receiver.