Gregory Reyes (born September 1, 1962) is an American businessman who most recently served as the chief executive officer (CEO) for Brocade Communications.
Reyes obtained his first CEO position with Wireless Access, a Silicon Valley start-up company specializing in two-way pagers.
[3] As CEO of Brocade Communications, Reyes sold SAN (storage area network) infrastructure to a number of companies, including IBM, EMC Corp., Compaq, Dell, NEC, and HP.
During Reyes's time as CEO, Brocade was the largest manufacturer of networking equipment that provides data storage in the world.
Reyes resigned from Brocade when he was indicted by the U.S. government for accounting irregularities associated with corporate stock options backdating.
[10] In June 2005, Brocade announced that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had undertaken an investigation into the company stock option accounting.
In the trial, Reyes stated that he had no intent to deceive anyone, and that his decisions relied largely in good faith on the accuracy of documentation provided by Brocade's finance department, which incorrectly accounted for stock options in Brocade's financial statements that he signed in good faith and with the belief that they had been properly accounted for.
In a letter to Fortune Magazine she told an editor that she, as well as other high-ranking members of the finance department, had been aware of the practice of backdating stock options to rank-and-file employees.
Moore's conflicting statements were not disclosed during the trial, and prosecutor Adam Reeves made numerous statements to the jury using Moore's testimony to support his argument that Reyes had deceived Brocade's finance department; he presented a diagram to illustrate that no one in the finance department was aware of the backdating; he made statements in his closing arguments claiming that employees of the finance department did not have any idea that the backdating had occurred, adding that the government's theory, based on their investigational findings, supported this conclusion.
On January 16, 2008, Reyes was found guilty of 10 counts of fraud and conspiracy, including falsifying corporate accounting books and records, and participating in a stock options backdating scheme.
Reyes was sentenced to 21 months in prison in addition to a $15 million fine, making him the first executive to be convicted of the concealment of stock options backdating.
[14] In August 2009, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Reyes's conviction due to prosecutorial misconduct in making a false assertion of material fact in its closing argument to the jury.
[31] After Reyes was released from prison, and after his probation had ended, he attempted to purchase a handgun, and was denied when the background check revealed that he was a convicted felon.