Fugitive tech mogul Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, who’s been on the lam for more than four years, yesterday paid nearly $54 million in ill-gotten gains to settle civil fraud charges related to backdating stock options.
Alexander, the 58-year-old former chairman and CEO of voicemail-software maker Comverse Technology, still faces criminal charges for skipping out on his bail and is fighting extradition from the southwest African nation of Namibia. The Securities and Exchange Commission civil charges were filed in 2006, the year he flew the coop.
Namibia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. Alexander and his wife, Hana, agreed to forfeit two investment accounts they virtually abandoned in the US when they fled with their three kids.
“Alexander fled halfway around the world, but he was not able to escape the financial consequences of his crimes,” Brooklyn US Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a statement.
The cash will pay off numerous shareholder lawsuits that lingered for years.
Alexander was charged with illegally pocketing $138 million since the 1990s by backdating stock options at the Long Island-based firm, which he built into a $1 billion annual business by developing voicemail technology for cell phones.
What’s more, he is believed to have stashed as much as $250 million in accounts around the world, including $57 million he had wired to his native Israel and $38 million he invested in Namibia with a local general to build low-income housing.
The Alexander family lives openly in a posh golf-course estate and travels freely in the impoverished country, where more than half its people live on subsistence farms on per-capita income of $155 a year.

