By John Rigas, former president and CEO of Adelphia Communications

I would like to clarify a couple of remarks attributed to me by David Voreacas in his Bloomberg News Service article, part of which was carried in Endeavor News on Jan. 6.

First, when I refer to "mistakes" that I made, I do not mean to imply that I broke the law, but that at times my business judgment and my assessment of people could have been better.

Some of the worst mistakes that can be ascribed to my family and me, for example, were tactical errors made in the heat of battle after March 27, 2002, when we were slow to recognize how certain individuals in critically important positions, both inside and outside of Adelphia, were more interested in saving themselves than in saving the company.

Second, I would like to make clear that I do not think Deloitte and Touche or Buchanan Ingersoll, Adelphia's outside auditors and SEC attorneys, respectively, provided "bad advice" to the company. Indeed, I admired their dedication, knowledge, and hard work over nearly a 20-year period. They were true professionals.

I vividly recall on many occasions seeing young accountants from Deloitte toiling late into the night in order to meet deadlines for an Adelphia audit. We accepted the recommendations of these two firms without reservation at every step of our way as a rapidly growing public company. They in fact explicitly directed us on how to disclose and account for our various transactions.

My disappointment, then, was all the more intense after the March 27 investor conference call, when neither Deloitte nor Buchanan -- firms to which Adelphia and the Rigases had paid millions of dollars every year -- failed to defend the instructions they had given on the public disclosures and accounting treatments which were being questioned.

Stunned by investor reaction to the disclosure of Rigas debt and seemingly paralyzed by their fear of civil litigation and government investigations, they left the Rigases and a few others to bear the consequences of misinformation running wild in the marketplace and in the media.

Deloitte, after having enthusiastically pronounced its readiness to sign-off on Adelphia's financial statements for the year 2001, began backtracking shortly after the conference call, refusing to certify the financial statements pending an exhaustive review of new information.

As April 2002 progressed, this re-audit became ever more extensive. No amount of information seemed to satisfy the Deloitte auditors, who were now taking direction from their national office and from their lawyers. The financial statements were never formally approved.

Without financial statements certified by an independent auditing firm, Adelphia's annual report (Form 10-k) could not be issued, causing the company to default on its loan and bond covenants, cutting off its ability to draw down funds, and throwing it into a severe liquidity crisis. The lack of a 10-k also resulted in NASDAQ's delisting of Adelphia securities.

Buchanan, meanwhile, after having represented first the various Rigas entities and, then, the public Adelphia for nearly two decades (and after never having budged from a position that everything was fine at Adelphia and with the Rigas companies) sent a letter in April to inform us that its lawyers had actually only represented the Rigases on one narrow matter in all that time and that it was discontinuing any further representation of the family.

In the months and years afterwards, the Buchanan firm refused to talk directly to any of the Rigases and only on a very limited basis with our lawyers, and made it extremely difficult for us to obtain documents needed for our defense. Its abandonment, in short, could not have been more complete.

Although there is more to the story behind Adelphia's collapse than the actions of Deloitte and Buchanan, had these two large, respected firms stood up from the very beginning for what they had done, explaining the sound principles which lay behind several key public disclosures, Adelphia's precipitous decline would likely have been stopped long before reaching crisis proportions. What is 'My Side?'

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