The decision also means that one of the past year's highest-profile corporate scandals has fizzled despite pledges by President Bush to crack down on accounting and other shenanigans that have sapped investor confidence.

Also, Global Chairman Gary Winnick, who co-founded the fiber-optic network giant in 1997, can now concentrate on defending himself against shareholder lawsuits and a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry.

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, which had been probing Global since at least February, recently ended its investigation because it couldn't uncover enough evidence to bring charges, say sources close to the case.

Attention now shifts to the SEC's civil probe, which doesn't require the same burden of proof as that faced by the Justice Department. The SEC declined to comment.

Global, Winnick and U.S. Attorney Debra Yang in Los Angeles also declined to comment.

The decision surprised attorneys for shareholders and a former Global finance executive suing Global. They concede that a criminal conviction of the company or its officers could have strengthened their cases by uncovering evidence of wrongdoing.

But attorney Jay Eisenhofer, whose Delaware firm is lead counsel in securities fraud lawsuits covering potentially hundreds of thousands of Global shareholders, says he remains confident that his clients will prevail.

One reason the SEC probe continues may be that the agency is holding out for a bigger settlement than anything offered by Global, says Paul Murphy, an attorney representing former finance executive Roy Olofson.

His allegations of accounting irregularities spurred the probes by Justice, the SEC and congressional investigators.

Global was one of the fastest-growing telecoms in the late 1990s as it spun a web of fiber-optic cable connecting the USA to more than 200 cities in 27 countries.

The telecom, whose Chapter 11 filing is the sixth-biggest in U.S. history, is reorganizing in bankruptcy court. A federal judge last week approved its reorganization plan. The company hopes to emerge from Chapter 11 proceedings early next year.

Murphy says Justice did not commit "the horses and the time" to the Global case -- which was one of several Justice inquiries including those of WorldCom, Enron, Tyco International and others.

Investigators for the U.S. attorney interviewed Olofson once -- about two weeks after Global filed for Chapter 11 protection in January, Murphy says. "They never contacted us again," he says.

SEC investigators were in touch with Murphy during the summer but not since then, he says.

Criminal charges against companies such as Global are less common than against individual employees because it is harder to prove companywide criminal intent, says John Gordon, a former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.

In June, a federal jury convicted accounting giant Arthur Andersen of obstruction of justice in the Enron case -- one of the few charges against a company in the past year's corporate scandals.

More charges against corporations are expected after the July appointment of Bush's financial fraud swat team, Gordon says. Yang is on the team.

-- Jim Hopkins