For years Barry Romeril, the former chief financial officer of Xerox, has yearned to speak out about massive accounting-fraud charges leveled against him and his company by the SEC in 2002, say his lawyers at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

But weeks after the SEC lodged civil fraud charges in Manhattan federal court against him and his fellow corporate officers and directors in 2003, Romeril and the other defendants quickly settled the action. While doing so, they signed on to an SEC consent-agreement provision that forbid them from ever making “any public statement denying, directly or indirectly, any allegation in the complaint,” according to Romeril’s lawyers.

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