KB Home – the American Dream turned nightmare.

Bruce Karatz is no gold carrot.

This website has been started because CEO Jeff Mezger and other executives at KB Home, have chosen to ignore us and our many requests they "buy back" this home.

[View all the KB Executives who built this KB Lemon] See how many other of your favorite companies they work for and how many other possible defective and overpriced products they may bring to market. Bruce Karatz Stock manipulation trial begins in Los Angeles February 23rd 2010.

Let see if they deserve a tribute page like Bruce Karatz. View Bruce E. Karatz friends and connections at the TOP!

KB Home chief executive Bruce Karatz was indicted for allegedly orchestrating the backdating of stock options from 1999 to 2006, which made his options worth an extra $1.63 to $4.56 per share. This is the same era in which this home was built by KB Home, provoking the term "A KB Home Sucks". Share price to these executives were way more important than building a quality home.

Illegal stock-option backdating occurs when companies manipulate the dates they award stock options to executives, so the executives can earn the highest possible profit on their shares.

Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein has called such accounting "yet another game played by corporate executives at dozens of companies to pick the shareholders' pockets. And it's the latest evidence of how executive compensation has become a cancer, eating away at the souls of even the most successful American corporations." It may also be considered a second career for the executives since how could you run the business if your consumed with just collecting as much as you can? How did you find time to run the business.

In 2006, The Wall Street Journal first reported the use of stock-option backdating at many companies. By the end of that year, backdating was identified at 160 companies (most were resolved without any charges). More than 50 executives were fired or resigned in the scandal's wake.

Three years later, the SEC has charged more than two dozen executives with wrongdoing. Check here soon as we are posting hundreds of story links about Bruce Karatz and his business practices posted across the Internet's new sources. We are also following breaking news on all KB executives, past and present.

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Nations highest paid Homebuilder? Karatz Got the Gold Mine While KB Homeowners Got The Shaft?

NEWSMAKER-KB Home's Karatz latest target of pay probes

LOS ANGELES, - Former KB Home Chief Executive Bruce Karatz, once the nation's highest-paid homebuilding executive but now accused of inflating his pay, has been reduced to a cautionary note in an unfolding tale of excess in corporate America.

Karatz, deemed a marketing genius even among the showmen he rubbed shoulders with in Los Angeles, was indicted last week on allegations that he had secretly boosted his already stratospheric compensation by backdating millions in stock options for himself and other KB Home employees.

A man best known in his hometown for serving on civic and charity boards and an occasional fixture on Hollywood's red carpets, Karatz faces more than four centuries in prison if convicted on all 20 counts related to stock options backdating. So Bruce's and his team decided to satrt a foundation to help the people of California with their Mortgage payments. Never mind the people who got stuck with a defective KB Home. What a big heart and such morales!

View Larger Map  Bruce Karatz House: the design does not appear to be built by KB Home. Bruce Karatz,700 Stone Canyon Rd S., Los Angeles, CA 90077. Address is approx.

BING MAP official records show that Bruce Karatz owns the house.

"This investigation painted a picture of avarice and dishonesty at its core," said Salvatore Hernandez, assistant director in charge of the FBI in Los Angeles.

On March 26, Karatz will make his first court appearance in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the start of high-profile criminal case at which lawyers say they will argue the ex-CEO helped create 5,000 jobs and oversaw explosive growth that benefited shareholders.

Karatz likely will hear the charges against him and the U.S. magistrate handling the case may discuss his release or bail terms.

The executive's attorneys said they will prove to a jury that he did nothing wrong, while federal prosecutors accused him of awarding himself and others millions of dollars in undisclosed stock-based compensation by backdating them over a seven-year period.

Over his 20 years as CEO of the No. 5 U.S. homebuilder, Karatz built a reputation for coaxing consistent growth from a notoriously cyclical business, dreaming up marketing schemes, and running with the glitterati of Los Angeles.

His campaigns ranged from a much-publicised pact with Martha Stewart -- the lifestyle maven who served a 10-month sentence in 2005 for lying about stock sales -- to build Stewart-branded homes across southern California, to devising a replica of the home of cartoon family The Simpsons in Vegas.

In the process, he wound up getting paid more than anyone else in the industry, mainly through stock options.

Karatz was forced out of the company in 2006 amid pressure from an internal investigation into options backdating. The housing bubble burst afterwards, and KB shares, like those of other builders, have plummeted 90 percent from their highs.

The stock was trading at just under $8.50 on Monday afternoon, a far cry from the $80-plus heights that KB Home used to command in 2005.

A BIGGER TARGET

Longtime friend and KB Home founder Eli Broad -- another noted philanthropist and sometime Hollywood socialite -- argued that Karatz's high profile made him "a more interesting target" than other executives accused or suspected of backdating in a government probe that began three years ago.

Karatz, 63, settled a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suit in 2008 without admitting or denying wrongdoing, agreeing to pay over $7 million to settle the charges: a drop in the ocean of the $232 million he's estimated to have made in his last three years at the firm, much of it from stock awards.

"The (KB Home) directors in this case clearly did not do right by shareholders in (ousting) Bruce," Broad told Reuters in an interview over the weekend. "There were so many other cases like that at ... other places."

Karatz tried to resolve allegations he worked with at least one other executive to hide the backdating from the board and auditors with a false paper trail, but the talks fell apart, two sources familiar with the situation said.

Neither Hernandez nor the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles would comment on Karatz's case.

Industry and pay experts say abuses of backdating, which was allowed until 2002 as long as companies took accounting charges for in-the-money options, resulted from flaws in a pay-for-performance system that encourages risk-taking and prizes short-term gains over long-term goals.

The system, set up by Congress in the 1990s to limit CEO paydays by deferring most of it as options, "ignored the possibility of a bull market that would give some executives enormous rewards for being in the right place at the right time," said Lynn Stout, UCLA professor of corporate and securities law. "The irony is that it wasn't about money; it was about status: to say 'my paycheck is bigger than yours.'"

Homebuilder CEO's were also pushed by investors to take on more risk as housing prices soared, said John Burns, CEO of John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, California.

Karatz brought in Countrywide, the bank that later became Ground Zero in California's mortgage meltdown, to deliver American dream homes. He scooped up land through the boom years of 2003-2005 and moved the company away from its starter home roots toward deluxe models -- a strategy that grew earnings faster than those of rivals, FBN Securities analyst Joe Locker said.

The rewards seemed worth the risk -- KB's revenue ballooned to $9.4 billion in 2005 from $4.6 billion in 2001.

"He was kind of a go-for-it personality .... That's how he ran his business," Locker said.

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