The Garden City Group administered class-action settlements reached after investors sued the telecommunications companies WorldCom and Global Crossing, businesses that helped symbolize corporate excesses in the late 1990s.

The Group, which is hired by attorneys, began work on those cases in 2003 and is just now winding down the disbursements, said president and chief operating officer Neil Zola.

The $6-billion WorldCom settlement is the second-largest in U.S. history and involved nearly a million claims, he said. The largest is Enron's $7-billion-plus settlement.

The WorldCom settlement came after the former Mississippi-based company's chief executive, Bernard Ebbers, was convicted in 2005 of an $11-billion accounting fraud scheme. Also in 2005, Global Crossing, once headquartered in Beverly Hills, Calif., and some top executives settled government allegations that the company artificially boosted its revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Global Crossing settlement involved 500,000 claims and totaled $450 million.

Read the full story here on the Chicago Tribune website.