In 1999, Dennis Kozlowski was hailed by investment magazine Barrons as "one of America's premier corporate chieftains".

Now the chairman and chief executive officer of Tyco just can't buy a break. Everyone and their mother has been after him for the past couple of years, with questions over accounting practices emerging in the New York Times in October, 1999.

Kozlowski beat back the critics, but in the wake of the Enron scandal, the questions have re-emerged.

The problems stems from the enormous number of acquisitions made by the company over the last decade, making it hard to track where it stands financially.

And while Tyco has been dogged with these accusations for years, and nothing unethical has turned up and many analysts think the accounting issues are overblown and say the stock is still substantially undervalued.

And Tyco stock started rallying this week and increased by more than ten percent on Wednesday after Kozlowski reassured investors on a conference call.

Tyco stock jumped 12.2 percent Wednesday to close at $25.92 a share. The stock was down 56 percent since the start of the year as accounting concerns and other issues battered the conglomerate, but this has shrunk to 46 percent as of yesterday.

Kozlowski reassured investors that there is no "liquidity issue" at Tyco, and the company is still predicting free cash flow of more than $4 billion for the current year.

He said Tyco expects to announce a sale of its plastics business by the middle of April, and is planning to either sell or spin off to Tyco shareholders the commercial lending business it bought last year.

Tyco said last month that it would break up its businesses into four separate companies- electronics and security; health care; fire protection and flow-control valves; and commercial lending to be called the CIT Group.

The company also said it would sell the plastics business, anticipating proceeds of between $3 billion and $4 billion.

"The ship is in good shape," Kozlowski said during the conference call. "We actually make things and sell them for cash."