[JURIST] The US Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that communications and media giant Time Warner [corporate website] has agreed to pay $300 million to settle charges alleging that it overstated online advertising revenue and the number of its AOL Internet subscribers and committed other securities frauds. The Commission's AOL complaint asserted that

The company artificially inflated the number of AOL subscribers in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2001 so it could report to the investment community that it had met its new subscriber targets, an important metric the market used to evaluate AOL (both before and after its merger with Time Warner).