The first executives have been charged with fraud in the stock options probe and there are more to come.

The former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems Inc, Gregory Reyes, and another executive Stephanie Jensen are the first to be charged. The pair also face civil charges and if found guilty, they each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in the slammer plus a $5 million fine, reports CBS.

According to the complaints, Reyes allegedly backdated documents so strike prices appeared to be the same as the company's share price on the date they were issued. Both he and Jensen allegedly backdated board of director meeting minutes so that it appeared the stock options committee granted options on dates that Brocade's share price was relatively low when, it's alleged, those meetings never too place.

Attorneys for Reyes say their client is innocent and have put out a statement to this effect:

"Greg Reyes is innocent, and if necessary, we will prove his innocence in a court of law.
"Financial gain is always the motive in securities fraud cases, and here there was none. There is not even an allegation of self-enrichment, or self-dealing. Nor is there any evidence of an intent to misstate the financial statements of the company.
"It is surprising that in an area where the government is investigating at least 60 companies on allegations of stock options accounting irregularities, the government would choose to charge Mr. Reyes. Mr. Reyes is not even alleged to have granted himself any of the options at issue in the case, nor is there even an allegation that he made any money through the alleged option irregularities. All he did was what his Board authorized him to do. During a time where competition was extremely high in Silicon Valley for employees, he awarded options to new and current employees of the company - from the receptionist to engineers - to attract and retain talent.

Should be some trial. But Reyes is unlikely to be Robinson Crusoe. More execs are likely to be charged.

Jacob Frenkel, attorney at the law firm of Shulman Rogers Gandal Pordy & Ecker in Rockville, Maryland said: ''We're not going to see the ladder-climbing that we've seen. We're likely to see a lot of cases in a short period of time and a rapid clean-up," reports Reuters.

All this runs counter to the reports that the wave of white collar prosecutions has peaked.

Truth is we can expect to see a lot more of this sort of stuff. As Bloomberg's Graef Crystal points out in his piece, there's only so much that one law like Sarbanes-Oxley can fix and he has conducted a rigorous analysis to prove his case:

"Sarbanes-Oxley seems to have put a clamp on the practice of backdating options -- deciding today, after your company's stock price has soared, that your new option should carry a price that occurred weeks or months ago.
"But it's still open season for what I call opportunistic grant timing, or the practice of making a grant ahead of good news that only insiders know.''

More charges and shady pay practices? Better get used to it.