Charles Wang

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Wang (王).

Charles B. Wang (王嘉廉, pinyin: Wáng Jiálián) (born August 19, 1944) is the founder of Computer Associates International, Inc. (now CA, Inc.) and owner of the New York Islanders ice hockey team. He was born in Shanghai, but moved to Queens, NY, when he was eight years old. He attended the elite Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Queens College in New York, and began working at Columbia University. In 1976, Wang started Computer Associates on credit cards at the age of 31. He has since authored two books to help executives master technology: Techno Vision (1994, McGraw-Hill) and Techno Vision II (1997, McGraw-Hill). Wang retired from Computer Associates in 2002.

He is currently the majority owner of the New York Islanders hockey franchise, which he became part-owner of in 2000 and he later bought out the share of business partner Sanjay Kumar in 2004, and the New York Dragons Arena football franchise. He is the master developer of the Lighthouse, the transformation of the Nassau Coliseum and surrounding 77 acres. The project will include a five-star hotel; condominiums; an Athletic Complex featuring four ice rinks, a basketball facility and state-of-the-art health club that will serve as the Islanders’ practice facility and also be open to the public; a Sports Technology Center; open air plaza; and conference center.

He is also founder of Plainview Properties, a real estate firm which recently announced a major development, Old Plainview — a traditional village combining townhouses, apartments, offices, restaurants, a Hyatt hotel and recreation space using “smart growth” concepts.

1 Philanthropy
2 Controversy
- 2.1 New York Islanders
3 External links

[edit] Philanthropy

Wang is also well known for his philanthropic works with such causes as the Make a Wish Foundation, and Smile Train among others. His donation of over $50 million dollars to the State University of New York at Stony Brook for the construction of the Charles B. Wang Center was the largest in history to a SUNY school.

Charles Wang funded the expansion of the Chinatown Health Clinic and the clinic has been renamed the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center.

[edit] Controversy

Charles Wang's career as CEO of Computer Associates was marked with controversy.

In building up CA, Wang engaged in fifty takeovers followed by immediate firing of top management and key employees. His strategies had provoked descriptions like "rapacious", "heartless" and "Attila-the-Hun", largely driven by the draconian practices he engaged in with acquired companies, which included tactics which were typically legal only in New York State. The most notorious of these practices included forcing the employees of an acquired company to sign new employment contracts on-the-spot at a company meeting without prior warning - employees who refused the sign at the meeting or wished to have the contracts reviewed by a third party prior to signing were immediately fired.

He also alienated many in and out of CA by his paternalistic, family-oriented management style. In 1979, three years after CA's founding, Wang had installed his older brother Tony, a onetime corporate lawyer, as president and COO. Tony held the position until his retirement in 1992 to make way for Sanjay Kumar. In 1998, Nancy Li, Charles Wang's second wife, was named CA's chief technology officer. Wang has argued that the investment community was punishing CA's stock because of his refusal to override his sense of familial loyalty to avoid the appearance of nepotism.

In 1998 Wang had initiated a $9 billion hostile tender offer for the shares of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). The Washington Post weighed in on the side of CSC's management by alluding to CA's "ties to foreigners". It was a pointed reference to Wang's origin and CA's clients in China. The suggestion was that becoming linked with CA would jeopardize CSC's contracts with U.S. government agencies. Wang dropped the tender offer, blaming the uproar on racism and inflated national security concerns.

In 2000 a class-action lawsuit accused Wang, then president Sanjay Kumar and co-founder Russell Artzt of wrongly reporting more than $500 million in revenue in its 1998 and 1999 fiscal years, in order to artificially inflate the stock price. A previous stock option set in 1995 specified that a certain number of shares would vest when Computer Associates' shares sustained a target price. The benchmark was met in 1998, and the three executives combined received nearly $1 billion in Computer Associates stock with Wang himself netting $670 million; he had already been the highest paid CEO in the US for the past four years. Since then, at least four other class-action suits have been filed against Computer Associates, all of which have named Wang specifically. As the controversy continued to dog Wang even after he returned a portion of the stock award, he quit as CEO in 2000, and later resigned as Chairman of the Board in 2002.

His successor Sanjay Kumar resigned as chairman and chief executive in April 2004, following an investigation into the accounting scandal which improperly reported revenue. A federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Kumar on fraud charges on September 22, 2004 [1]. Kumar pled guilty to obstruction of justice and securities fraud charges on April 24, 2006 [2].

[edit] New York Islanders

A Forbes article investigated why certain NHL franchises could remain profitable despite poor attendance and overall league unprofitability. They found that several league owners underreported their cable broadcast revenue; they specifically accused Wang of excluding half of the $17 million paid to the Islanders for the 2003 cable broadcast season.

After hiring Neil Smith as the general manager for the New York Islanders during the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals, he fired him 40 days later, replacing it by the team's backup goalie Garth Snow, who announced his retirement in order to take the job. Wang stated philosophical differences to be the cause of the firing. Islander fans have been very critical of this move, saying that Wang gets too involved with the management of his team, not letting experienced and Cup-winning GM Smith have freedom of action.

On September 12, 2006, Wang and GM Snow signed goaltender Rick DiPietro to a 15-year, $67.5 million contract. The length of the deal, as well as Wang's signing of Alexei Yashin to a 10-year contract a few years before, have added to controversy.