The Financial Times reports that Arnaud Lagardère and Manfred Bischoff, the French and German co-chairmen of EADS, will meet early this week to discuss the future of Noël Forgeard, co-chief executive of the aerospace group which last week stunned the market with a severe profit warning.

Pressure is mounting on the controversial former head of Airbus, EADS’s aircraft subsidiary, after his German counterpart, Tom Enders, on Sunday raised questions over the timing of controversial share sales and hinted at changes in the group’s management structure.

“The crisis at Airbus is also a crisis for EADS,” he said. “But every crisis brings opportunities. Because of this we should not act too hastily and only consider personal consequences and changes in procedure at Airbus.”

The comments are merely the latest public expression of the internal divisions which seem to be paralysing the Franco-German group as it tries to resolve serious problems at its biggest revenue earner, Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer.

Warnings of severe delays to its flagship A380 airliner project cut 26 per cent off the group’s shares last week. The group’s chairmen are understood to want to resolve the problems quickly and a decision on management changes could come this week.

At the very least, the chairmen are expected to eliminate the post of Airbus chairman. Mr Forgeard has come under particular criticism for exercising share options in March, in line with company rules but just days before the group’s biggest shareholders announced plans to reduce their stakes and a month before the Airbus troubles emerged.

Although he was one of several EADS directors to exercise options, he is the only one to have come under public attack from unions, politicians and investors.

On Sunday Mr Enders appeared to offer his own implicit criticism.

“It would have been lucrative to exercise the options in March, given EADS’s high share price, but I felt this not to be appropriate,” he said in a statement.

Mr Forgeard has vigorously denied allegations of misconduct in a series of press interviews.

The New York Times says that throughout the 1990's, Silicon Valley companies were locked in an intense battle to recruit employees, and stock options were their primary tool.

Micrel Inc., a semiconductor company based in San Jose, Calif., was no exception.

So when new hires began complaining that the company's volatile share price meant that colleagues who had arrived just days earlier were receiving stock options worth thousands of dollars more, Micrel executives moved to satisfy the troops. They raised with their auditor, Deloitte & Touche, the idea of adopting a new options pricing strategy similar to one that other tech companies, including Microsoft, used at the time.

Instead of granting options at the market price on a new employee's hire date, Micrel proposed setting the price at the lowest point in the 30 days from when the grant was approved.

It seemed like an ideal solution. The 30-day window could help Micrel attract and reward new hires on a more equal footing, while helping to retain existing employees. And if it were extended up the corporate ladder, the prospect of built-in gains and tax breaks, worth millions of dollars, could enrich senior executives.

But the 30-day pricing method, which Micrel adopted in mid-1996, was an aggressive move legally and financially. In hindsight, it was also a major misstep.

Nearly five years later, Deloitte reversed its opinion and urged Micrel to restate its financial reports. The Internal Revenue Service came banging on its door. And today, Micrel and Deloitte are passing blame back and forth in court.

Micrel is hardly the only firm ensnared in such a mess. What began as a creative solution among a handful of technology firms to address recruitment issues soon became common practice in Silicon Valley. It appears the practice also became a way to enrich chief executives and other top managers.

The result is a nationwide scandal with major accounting, corporate governance, tax and disclosure ramifications. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies are caught up in a giant civil and criminal law enforcement sweep by the Justice Department, the I.R.S. and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It is no coincidence that stock option abuses are once again taking center stage in an unfolding scandal. The easy money that options can rain down on recipients motivated many of the numbers games that companies played with their quarterly earnings during the stock market boom, leading to numerous accounting fraud prosecutions at Enron, WorldCom and others.

In the latest scandal, companies seem to have handed out stock options that were already "in the money" on the date of grant, undermining the idea of using options as a pay-for-performance tool. The practice appears to have been widespread from the early 1990's to 2002, and possibly beyond.

Handing out in-the-money options is not illegal as long as the grants are disclosed to shareholders. At the time, in-the-money options had to be counted as an expense on the company's books. (New rules now require companies to routinely deduct options as an expense.) Failure to disclose or to deduct in-the-money options from income could lead to securities fraud charges. And because such options do not qualify for tax breaks once they are exercised, such grants raise tax fraud issues, too.

The Micrel case and others raise troubling questions about how companies that were pushing the envelope of accounting and tax practice were able to get the blessings of auditors and lawyers. And the widening scandal reveals the extent to which boards of directors, especially the compensation committees that approve option grants, may have failed to do their jobs.

"It appears, from the S.E.C. and a number of reports that are coming up daily, that there was a systemic problem at a lot of companies," said Bradley E. Beckworth, a plaintiffs' attorney who has filed one of the first class-action lawsuits against Brocade Communications and KPMG, its auditor, for options backdating. "If these accounts turn out to be true, you have to ask the question, Who was the gatekeeper here?"

Micrel, by most accounts, is one of the last technology companies where one might expect to find problems. While the chip manufacturer was one of the high-flying growth businesses of the 1990's, it was different in several respects from most of the era's fledgling public companies.

Its founder and longtime chief executive, Raymond D. Zinn, a 68-year-old engineer, is a Mormon who calls honesty his guiding rule. And unlike many of its technology rivals, Micrel's own profits, not venture financing, fueled its growth until it went public in 1994.

But like many high-tech firms in the mid-1990's, Micrel went on a hiring binge. The Bay Area was booming with opportunities for ambitious people. Companies were growing at astronomical rates and desperately needed talent to fill new jobs. And instead of higher salaries, companies preferred to grant stock options to lure new employees.

Micrel, a company that had a few hundred employees but was adding two or three new people a week, began facing a fairness problem in its options awards in mid-1996.

A hypothetical employee who was granted stock options on July 1 that year, when Micrel shares were trading at $2.08, would have stock options that were "under water," or worthless, by July 15, when Micrel's shares were trading at $1.56. But someone who started on July 15 would have received options granted at the $1.56 price, and would soon be in the money as the stock rose. Both employees would be better off than someone who was granted options at the end of the month, when Micrel shares closed at $2.15.

"We had some complaints from newly hired employees," said J. Vincent Tortolano, Micrel's general counsel, though he was unable to provide specific examples. Someone, he said, came up with the idea of trying to make the option grants a little more equitable.

The solution, Mr. Tortolano said, was the 30-day low pricing method for new employees. But when it was subsequently extended across the company, the plan particularly benefited Micrel's top executives, enriching them by millions of dollars.

While its origins remain murky, the practice was not unfamiliar to many Silicon Valley insiders. Many companies were rumored to have similar programs.

Microsoft acknowledged that it had a similar options pricing method going back several years, which it ended in 1999. Company inquiries about such plans were common at the time, compensation experts said.

Prospects reported that Microsoft waited until the end of the month and picked the date with the lowest stock price — and did so without taking an accounting charge. "I heard it over and over and over again," recalled one compensation lawyer, who requested anonymity because he still had several technology companies as clients.

Micrel had similar goals for its plan. According to court filings, the company's concerns about the pricing method were twofold: First, it wanted to gain assurance that the proposal would not cause the options to be taken as an expense, which would lower earnings and could depress the stock price. Second, it wanted to make sure the plan complied with generally accepted accounting principles.

In court filings, Micrel said it raised those issues with Roy M. Avondet, a top partner in the Northern California practice of Deloitte & Touche. Mr. Avondet, who was in charge of the Micrel account, agreed that his firm would provide advice, the filings say. Mr. Avondet could not be reached for comment.

Deloitte, of course, was the longtime auditor for Microsoft and one of the leading accounting firms in Silicon Valley at the time. Its auditors often charted new territory on many accounting issues. Lucrative fees were also at stake.

"The technology companies were not looking for the low-cost provider," said Allan D. Koltin, the president of PDI Global, a Chicago-based consulting company that works with many large accounting firms. "They were looking for the provider who could interpret complex tax and accounting issues the same way the technology world thought they should be interpreted."

For all the major accounting firms, "the pressure was enormous to win at all costs," he added. "If you think there was pressure to please Ken Lay at Enron, this was a whole other level."

Deloitte reviewed the proposal and, through Mr. Avondet, advised Micrel that its 30-day pricing method followed the rules and would not have adverse accounting consequences, court documents state. But the carefully worded Micrel complaint stops short of saying that Deloitte gave its written assurance.

According to a company memo obtained by The New York Times, Micrel's plan worked by permitting the stock option strike price to "automatically be 'reset' to the new lower, fair market price" in the 30 days after a new employee's start date.

Accounting experts said that the practice appeared to conflict with an S.E.C. accounting bulletin, which provided for favorable treatment for stock options only if they were awarded at fair market value on the date of grant. Micrel's plan, compensation specialists said, implied a loose interpretation of the term "grant date."

The S.E.C. rule, which allowed companies to forgo counting those option grants as an expense on the income statement, was changed years later over the strong objections of many technology companies, which argued that the options were a crucial pay-for-performance tool.

The 30-day pricing method also raises disclosure issues. In August 1996, Micrel submitted to the S.E.C., as the rules required, a plan for issuing new shares under an existing stock option program. It spelled out many terms, including that "the exercise price of each option shall not be less than the fair market value of the shares" on the date of grant.

Mr. Zinn and his two top lieutenants at the time — Robert J. Barker and Warren H. Muller — signed off on the plan. So did the three members of its board.

Morrison & Foerster, the San Francisco law firm hired as Micrel's outside counsel, affirmed the terms of the plan in an opinion letter.

But when Micrel adopted the 30-day pricing method, it did not alert shareholders to the changes.

Mr. Tortolano, the Micrel general counsel, said there was no reason to do so, denying that the 30-day method ever modified the plan's terms. "That is a legal determination," he said. "We fully believe that our practices were in keeping and in full compliance with the option plans we had in place at the time." Mr. Zinn and the other top executives, as well as Morrison & Foerster, were not available to comment.

Micrel, which has dismissed Deloitte as its auditor, now casts itself as the victim of bad advice. The company contends that Deloitte's decision to reverse its view of the 30-day pricing method in December 2001, after almost five years of audits, caught it completely off guard.

The company was forced to restate earnings downward. And in its lawsuit against Deloitte, Micrel claims the total price of the flawed option plan could reach $58.6 million. Micrel was more successful with the I.R.S., which backed off an attempt in 2002 to collect $51 million in taxes.

Robert A. Meyer, the lawyer representing Deloitte, denied the company did anything wrong and declined further comment.

Deloitte's recommendations "led us to the wrong conclusion," said Larry L. Hansen, a former Micrel director who stepped down in 2005. "Because that conclusion was then changed, it caused the company a lot of pain and heartburn."

One former Micrel employee, however, compared the shock of Deloitte's reversal to believing "this guy was your cousin your whole life and then you found out he was really your brother."

Today, Micrel and dozens of companies are left to argue that regulations governing a stock grant's date are murky and open to interpretation. But others say the rules were always clear. "The goalposts were clear to anybody who bothered to look at them," said James F. Reda, a compensation consultant.

The NYT also says that there have been all sorts of pronouncements in the past week about the ambitions and absurdities of the Iraq war, but nothing in newspapers, on cable or even out there in the blogosphere matched the impact of a deft little turn in the middle of "The War Tapes," a documentary about — and filmed by — a New Hampshire National Guard Unit stationed in Iraq that opened in theaters two weeks ago.

Specialist Mike Moriarty is filming his squad leader, Staff Sgt. Kevin Shangraw, as they bounce along in a Humvee. He asks his leader for his take on the broader mission, and Sergeant Shangraw comes straight off the dome with a government-issue rationale.

"Well, I think it's a fantastic opportunity for the Iraqis to establish a new history in the country and be able to be a free and democratic society, which in turn should stabilize the whole Middle East and create a freer and more stable earth as we know it."

"Tell me how you really feel," an unseen Specialist Moriarty prompts.

Sergeant. Shangraw waits a beat as the bleak landscape flies by in the window before answering.

"Then, after that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."

It is mordantly effective filmmaking. "The War Tapes" has the stock characters of any war movie — the gung-ho guy, the wiseacre, the bookish one — but the fact that they are actually fighting the war not only gives them a perspective on events most of us are seeing through a straw, but also a ferocious credibility. The movie is less diatribe than a vérité tour of the vagaries of war in general and this one in particular. (Much of the unit's mission involves guarding convoys of supply trucks from Halliburton, driven by highly paid civilians.)

"The War Tapes" is one of a rash of current documentaries feeding appetites for information and coverage beyond traditional channels of information. "An Inconvenient Truth," a filmed version of former Vice President Al Gore's slide show on global warming, has turned the most boring of issues — and public personalities — into an entertainment. "Who Killed the Electric Car?", a whodunit about the death of electric vehicles in California, landed with enough impact that the Smithsonian removed its only electric vehicle from display last week. "The Road to Guantánamo," a hybrid of documentary and feature techniques, seemed to neatly prefigure the recent events at the prison.

THE current surge in politically inflected documentaries seems like a mashed-up, digital version of the 1960's, when books like "Silent Spring," "Unsafe at Any Speed" and "The Other America" came out of nowhere to define public debate. Those interested in advancing specific points of view these days are picking up the 800-pound pencil of filmmaking, in part because digital technology has made it easier to deliver complicated political messages in a visual narrative.

But the cluster of serious, point-of-view documentaries may also represent something else, a coup d'etat on the status quo. Just as those big books of the 60's took on the elites of the day (chemical companies, Detroit engineers) these films betray a disaffection with their postindustrial counterparts (Hollywood, the traditional news media) for filling theaters with brain-dead blockbusters and neglecting important stories.

"Documentaries used to explore issues, but there has been an extraordinary explosion of political advocacy," said Sheila Nevins, president of documentary films at HBO. "I don't think the evening news is doing a good job of expressing the confusion about the state of the world, and this is a soapbox that a lot of people are turning to."

Michael Moore, whose "Fahrenheit 911," and "Bowling for Columbine" set the template for the new political documentary, believes there are two reasons we are seeing these films in theaters.

"Mainstream media, especially The New York Times, has failed to cast a skeptical eye on those in power," he said. "The other reason is that Hollywood has not done the job of producing interesting films of substance. If journalism isn't doing the job and fiction isn't doing the job, nonfiction has stepped in with compelling characters, good stories and important films."

Sgt. Zack Bazzi, one of the stars and battlefield auteurs of "The War Tapes," said the war he fought in (and probably will again) is the one he saw in the documentary, which was directed by Deborah Scranton.

"The strongest message of the film is that you have three primary characters who have very different views of the war who do their jobs to the best of their abilities with no regrets," he said, speaking by cellphone from Vermont.

Suddenly, gunfire erupted in the background. "That isn't real. Those are blanks," he said, explaining that he had volunteered for a few days to assist in training a unit that was on its way to Iraq.

"No film or book is going to capture the exact reality of a war, but this film comes as close as any I have seen," he said, moving away from the explosions. "This is another vehicle to relay the message and help bridge the current disconnect people feel with the war. It helps civilians be better citizens, to not confuse the war with the warrior."

The current impulse to fight back by picking up a camera is generally considered a liberal reflex — there are very few politically conservative documentarians. But much of the most bracing work comes from people who were not ideologues to begin with. Dean Devlin, an executive producer on "Who Killed the Electric Car?" decided to finance his first documentary after General Motors killed its electric car program and insisted that the cars, including his, be returned.

"Both the director and I lived that story," he said. "I think that now that you have high-quality digital cameras that produce images that can be edited on PC's, it is a much easier matter to put together a film. And audiences are much more comfortable with unscripted entertainment because of the ubiquity of reality television. It seems more real."

But verisimilitude does not equal impact, and it's an open question whether these documentaries will achieve any real-world effect. Books like "Silent Spring" and even "The Feminine Mystique" put long-ignored issues into the mainstream, altering or sometimes creating a debate. But even that rare documentary like "An Inconvenient Truth" that breaks through to wide release is up against the tyranny of mass consumption. It's likely that more people saw "Cars," an homage to joyous combustion, on its opening weekend than will ever see "Who Killed the Electric Car?" or "An Inconvenient Truth." The choir of the converted may line up for the latest cause, but most people who clog the multiplex are not going to be talking about global warming as they drive away.

"A book is far more consequential," said Ralph Nader, who brought at least a corner of Detroit to account with "Unsafe at Any Speed," a meticulously reported account of G.M.'s willful neglect of safety issues. He pointed out that although the Gore documentary was getting visibility, a serious, handsome book of the same name had been produced.

"No one ever sent a documentary to Congress. Films land with immediacy and get people angry, but they do not create a civic motivation," Mr. Nader said. "The usual homily is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to the documentary versus a traditional muckraking book, I think the reverse is true."

Mr. Nader, Mr. Moore and others suggest that a lightweight traditional media that is both afflicted with A.D.D. and rife with agendas has left filmmakers and citizens looking elsewhere for their information.

In "The War Tapes," Sgt. Stephen Pink walks into a dorm room with his camera at Fort Dix, N.J., where soldiers are preparing to go to Iraq.

One soldier protests. "We're not supposed to talk to the media."

"I'm not the media," he retorts as the soldier turns away. Sergeant Pink persists. "I'm not the media, damn it!"