Broadcom’s Billionaire Cofounder Sees Trial Pushed to 2010

Lordy. The global economy will probably rebound before the trial of billionaire Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicholas finally gets underway.

A federal judge said today that he’ll delay Nicholas’s trial until February 2010, after the trial for his co-defendant, William Ruehle, the former CFO of Broadcom, now scheduled to get underway in October.

Both have pleaded not guilty to 21 felony counts tied to $2.2 billion in backdated Broadcom employee stock options. Nicholas has also pleaded not guilty in a separate case that alleges he distributed illegal drugs while at Broadcom, including while entertaining clients on his jet.

The men’s trial originally scheduled to begin in April, but Nicholas petitioned the court to be tried separately, and in an unexpected twist, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney granted the motion. Judge Carney recently recently ruled against Nicholas’s request that a 2002 email he wrote to his then wife be kept out of both trials. While he agreed that Nicholas could keep the email out of Nicholas’s trial, he’s allowing Ruehle to use it in his defense.

Nicholas’s 2002 email, now well-known by those following his case, states that “the worst part is seeing the company falling apart because I am not fully functioning. However, I don’t care about Broadcom anymore, I just feel like a liar to the people I am recruiting into new positions.”