ter's accounting practices. A month later, in August 2004, Charter agreed to a $144 million settlement of shareholder lawsuits over accounting practices; this came a week after settling with the SEC over how it had counted subscribers. Although Charter did not admit to wrongdoing, it agreed not to violate securities laws. The same month, Charter's CFO Michael P. Huseby, resigned after having spent less than nine months on the job. Restructuring and refocusing Despite the ongoing litigation, some heavy hitters took an interest in Charter during that turbulent time. Mark Cuban, a self-made billionaire who starred in the ABC "reality" show The Benefactor, increased his investment in Charter in May 2003 to 6.5 percent, even as the company struggled to with a multi-billion dollar debt and speculations of bankruptcy. In the fall of 2003, Charter launched a plan to sell off "geographically non-strategic assets." In October, Charter sold a 25,500-subscriber Port Orchard, Wash., cable system for $91 million, and followed up that December by selling its East Coast cable system to Atlantic Broadband for $765 million. A May 2004 $8 billion debt restructuring maneuver allowed Charter to prevent a liquidity crisis and attain positive cash flow for the 2004 fiscal year. After posting two consecutive fiscal-year losses of $2.5 billion and $238 million, in 2002 and 2003 respectively, the company was able to stabilize costs and increase revenue cash flow. On a more positive note, Charter increased high-speed data revenue by 65 percent in 2003 from the previous year and increased its customer base by 39 percent. That May, Norwalk, Conn.-based GE Commercial Finance committed $284 million in financing to Charter, as part of Charter's $6.8 billion plan to restructure and consolidate existing debt. Always an innovator In January 2004, Charter became the first multi-system cable operator to launch an all-digital network. The Long Beach, Calif., system employs a hybrid fiber-coaxial network in place of an analog system to allow concurren