Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

[kyonides]

According to EFE Dell is willing to pay $100 million to settle down a federal sue against it because the US government learned about Intel payments to Dell that it used to meet their economic expectations for the current fiscal year and get some benefits from its shares...

The weird thing is that I couldn't get a link or document in English explaining what the actual situation was...

[dibl]

Re: Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

@kyonides come over to my house and I'll teach you my google-foo!

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/co...case/19565880/

It happened in July.

[kyonides]

Re: Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

There's a difference, it was a federal judge the one who determined the US government would accept the payment...

[dibl]

Re: Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

How's this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...f-approval.ars

But there's no change from the July settlement, as far a I can see.

[kyonides]

Re: Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

That's weird, the news I'm talking about was published yesterday... Or am I going crazy?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Dell and the $100 million "bribe"

It was settled yesterday, litigated over the last year, filed in 2009, and the CRIME was committed during the first three quarters of 2007. DELL (and Mr. Dell) took bribe money from Intel NOT to put AMD on the desktops it shipped. But, at the beginning of the last quarter of 2007 DELL reneged on their deal and started shipping PCs with AMD chips in them. Intel stopped paying the bribe money. The SEC Q10 showed that for the year 70% of DELL's income was Intel's bribe money. When Intel stopped paying it, Dell almost went under.

The problem is that DELL (the company and the man) did not have to admit to any "wrong doing" and, in effect, just paid the government $100M (isn't that a bribe?) in order to stay out of jail or get the corporate death penalty.

Intel fared far better. All it had to do was promise not to be naughty any more.

Intel officials said they were happy to put the lawsuit behind them, and noted that they did not admit to violating any antitrust laws nor to any allegations in the FTC lawsuit.

Even more disturbing is that what Intel was accused of doing,

In this case, Leibowitz said Intel's "disturbing behavior" had been going on for a decade. That behavior, he said, included using conditional rebates and discounts, as well as threats, against OEMs to limit their use of AMD and Nvidia products. The FTC also claimed that Intel altered some of its technologies—such as compilers—to weaken the performance of AMD products.

IS EXACTLY what Microsoft has been doing before AND since their convection in their DOJ trial.

Why is the government so interested in prosecuting Intel and Dell but not Microsoft?
<sarcasm>And you thought Justice was blind...</sarcasm>

[kyonides]

Re: Dell and the $100 million &quot;bribe&quot;

Justice is blind indeed... whenever she doesn't take off her Rayban sunglasses to put a MS dollars bribe in her pockets, of course