"The President has an opportunity this week at the economic forum in Texas to hold our top business leaders accountable for both past and future actions," Levin said. "While he did not support the recently-passed corporate reform bill until he signed it, he can correct that course and call upon corporate executives and board members to: 1) disgorge the undeserved profits they've received from cashing in stock options just before the stock price of their companies plummeted; 2) voluntarily expense stock options and stop the charade that these huge grants of stock options to top executives are not compensation and don't cost the company anything; and 3) end the use of shell, offshore corporations to help cook a company's books or avoid taxes."

"We can legislate, and we have; FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, can reconsider stock option accounting, and they are; the Department of Justice and the SEC can prosecute, and they will; but these leaders of industry carry the full responsibility to reform themselves. They should be taking aggressive action and not trying to dodge bullets, and the President should be leading the charge," Levin said.

As Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Levin earlier this year led a lengthy and detailed investigation into the Enron Board of Directors and the role of major financial institutions, namely Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch, in the collapse of Enron. He has also been a longtime proponent of stock option accounting.

A transcript of this portion of "Meet the Press" is below:

Partial Transcript of NBC's Meet the Press
August 11, 2002
Host: Andrea Mitchell

ANDREA MITCHELL: Finally, we're going to be talking later in this program with corporate and business leaders about the business scandals. You'll be leading the investigation into Enron. The president is holding an economic summit in Waco this weekend – this week, rather, Tuesday. What would you like to deliver if you were invited? No members of Congress, no Democrats have been invited. What message would you like to deliver in Waco if you were there?

CARL LEVIN: I'd like to see the president deliver a message. He so far has not been a leader in this effort. He's followed. He never strongly supported – or, indeed, supported – the Sarbanes bill, which he finally signed. But what we need is leadership. And there's a few things that he ought to do, and I call upon him to do this. One, he should call upon the executives of those companies that either went bankrupt or who saw their stock die within a year of the exercise of huge amounts of options by executives, he should call on those executives to return the money which they got from the exercise of those options to the shareholders. That money is ill-gotten gain by those executives, and I'd like to see the president call on the Ken Lays of this world to return that money to those companies and to the shareholders. He ought to call upon the companies, finally, to expense stock options. Right now a number of companies are finally showing stock options for what they are on their own books, which is compensation. It's been that stealth form of compensation, not shown as compensation on the books, as an expense, a business expense, which should--which has driven some of the corporate misdeeds and shenanigans. Stock options should be expensed. The president should get behind that cause, and join the stockholders' groups that say that. And he also ought to call for the end of the use of these entities offshore, which are used to both avoid taxes and to make the books look better. These offshore tax havens and the use of these other entities should be ended, and the president should take a leadership role, have those ill-gotten gains from those executives returned to the corporations. And the president should call upon the Ken Lays and others to return the hundreds of millions of dollars that they did not deserve, they did nothing to earn, they should not keep, that should go back to the shareholders and to the pension funds which were left holding the bag.

MITCHELL: Senator Levin, just briefly, do you think then prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, should return money from some of those same executives like Sam Waksal and others who contributed?

LEVIN: Any ill-gotten gains that the executives got that were supposed to be fiduciaries of a company--we're talking about executives and boards of directors.

MITCHELL: But what about campaign contributions from some of these very same players?

LEVIN: We're talking about ill-gotten executive gains. Any contributions that have come improperly of course should be returned. That goes without saying. If a contribution comes from a source which is polluted, it seems to me those contributions should be returned too. But we're talking here about what the president should do with the executives. And it seems to me we should focus on that and not, in any way, deflect his opportunity this week to call upon executives. If the president has gotten contributions from corporations to his campaign or any anyone else in public life, any of us have gotten contributions that should be returned, of course we should return them. But he has a chance at the summit this week to call upon corporate America to do the right thing, and I challenge him to do it. I hope he will do it. You're talking here about billions of dollars, in money which was received by executives and by members of boards of directors that they did not earn, that came as the result of the exercise of stock options from phony accounting which made the books look a lot better than they really were, and those executives should return that money.

MITCHELL: All right. Senator Levin, we have to leave it there. Thank you so much for being with us.

LEVIN: Thank you, Andrea.