I don't know. After my July 27th post, Lazard Ltd. (NYSE: LAZ) declined to comment to me on the record and it denied my request for an in-person interview with Wasserstein.

My original post migrated from the blogosphere -- DealBreaker and Gawker -- to the timber-based media -- Financial Times and the New York Post. In the August 3, 2006 Financial Times article, "Lazard sees no threat from boutique operations", Lazard's Vice Chairman, Steven Golub dismissed rumors of Wasserstein health problems, saying "He's fine." The New York Post article said, "Last week, rumors were swirling that Wasserstein had slimmed down significantly due to an unknown illness. While he has shed almost 50 pounds, sources said Wasserstein is in fine shape."

Claims that Wasserstein's health is "fine" are at odds with reports I've received since July 27. For instance, on August 11, a person who has seen Wasserstein recently said, "He has a prior heart condition and this may have been a recurrence. He looks like he lost 75 pounds and his voice sounds different."

Another person mentioned that Wasserstein had received quadruple bypass surgery prior to joining Lazard. On August 9th, without prompting, a former Wasserstein Perella & Co. banker said, "I saw Bruce Wasserstein two weeks ago and decided he must be sick because he looks like s--t." One who met with him around the same time said that Wasserstein, who did not look well, commented "it's just the pneumonia" -- the same ailment from which he suffered in December 2005 as reported in a January 15, 2006 New York Times profile. (I've had pneumonia in the past and it didn't cause me to lose weight.) In sum, at least five people who have seen him in recent weeks have wondered about his health.

Two things about Lazard's response don't add up for me:

• If Wasserstein's health is so great, why is Lazard comfortable leaving unchallenged the rumor that he's seriously ill? For example, why doesn't Lazard cauterize the issue by publishing a statement to the effect that "Wasserstein was out on medical leave, lawyers advised Lazard that it did not need to disclose the leave, and he's fine now"?
• Why haven't the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek picked up the story?

I don't know the answer to the second question but, to guess at the answers to the first, we need to take a detour into securities law.

As I noted in my previous post, the disclosure requirements regarding the health of a public company CEO are not clear. Companies may weigh the need for full disclosure of material information against the CEO's right to keep medical records private. A lawyer who formerly worked at the SEC agrees with my analysis and posits that corporate officers should forfeit their rights to medical privacy when they take on a position as a corporate officer.

But this leaves open the question of when an officer's health deteriorates to the point where it ought to be disclosed to shareholders. A recent case in point is the initial public offering of Lazard competitor, Evercore Partners Inc. (NYSE: EVR), whose CEO Roger Altman had a heart transplant in 2002. However, the IPO prospectus, which goes into some detail about the material adverse effect of losing key executives, made no mention of Altman's heart operation. A director of several public companies I spoke with dismissed concerns about not disclosing Altman's heart transplant because it is a pre-existing condition.

However, this director believes that if the CEO is out of the office for a period of time for reasons other than business or vacation, e.g., due to a medical condition, then the absence must be disclosed. If this director is right and Wasserstein was indeed out for eight weeks due to a medical condition, then this director believes that Lazard's board may have erred in not disclosing the absence.

Nevertheless, the legal ambiguity of CEO medical disclosure leads me to a simpler law -- the one prohibiting securities fraud. To qualify as securities fraud, a statement by a public company must be material, false, and made with the intent to mislead. For instance, if the CEO of a company was seriously ill and the company disclosed that the CEO was fine, the company might be committing securities fraud. This company's statement:

• Could be material since a top corporate officer's illness would likely influence a shareholder to buy or sell company shares;
• Is likely false since someone can't be both seriously ill and fine at the same time; and
• Could be made with the intent to mislead -- although such intent is hard to prove in the absence of specific evidence.

If Lazard says Wasserstein's health is "fine" but he's really sick, then perhaps it believes it can make a Clintonian argument that "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'fine' is." Since there's no clear guidance on when a CEO's health problem must be disclosed, Lazard may conclude that as long as it doesn't say anything that would lead to a securities fraud charge, it will be acting within the law. In this context, Lazard may believe that the less it says about Wasserstein's condition now, the better.

I spoke with a doctor who suggested that Wasserstein's reported condition could be explained by many events: cancer surgery, another heart surgery, a heart attack followed by the doctor telling him to lose weight or die, a doctor "sentencing" him to a "fat farm", or he just decided to lose weight. This doctor thinks that if it was a heart or cancer problem he might just retire because the stress of the job would aggravate his condition. Although he speculates that for Wasserstein the stress of not working – losing his place as a master of the universe – might actually be worse.

But perhaps Lazard can end the speculation about Wasserstein's health once and for all. No doubt Lazard investors would be interested in the answer.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm, and a Professor of Management at Babson College. He has no financial interest in the securities of Evercore or Lazard.