back to article IBM accused of bribery in China, South Korea

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging that the company paid bribes to government officials in China and South Korea to secure deals for the sale of mainframe and PCs among different government agencies. The lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court for the District of …

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  1. asdf
    FAIL

    morals aside

    The SEC is just putting a small sales like tax on the lucrative graft the tech companies will continue to engage in. What the point of public service without both money and girls on the side I guess.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Bribes to gov officials in China and South Korea?

    That's the standard way of making business over there, it's not even seen as bribes, more like a tax.

    Things tend to get approved and done a lot faster too, so I'm not sure which system actually works better.

    And tech is really a small player, you should see what the construction companies throw around...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh my, someone broke the rule nr 1

    What goes on in a Korean karaoke stays in a Korean karaoke.

    Not that I erm know anything about it, of course.

  4. ratfox

    What choice do they have?

    You might as well forbid them of doing business in these countries...

    Note that the only problem comes from the fact that in these backward places, they do not have a extended system of corru^H^H^H^H^H lobbying like the US have.

  5. JaitcH
    Unhappy

    IBM never was a white knight, with or without armour

    A few years ago IBM Canada had a deal to sell credit card terminals to a Canadian Bank - only the terminals hadn't been delivered because of late changes.

    IBM invoiced the bank, certifying the terminals were in their warehouse when in actual fact they were sitting in production waiting. The production company was paid, also before delivery.

    I had to work with a crew of 17 completing the order over Christmas, and they were paid very handsomely too. We had hire a non-delivery company who not only back-dated delivery slips but also took cash.

    At the IBM warehouse there were casual hires and one manager to stack the terminals and the delivery date on their system was all before Christmas as their computers were closed down for the Christmas-New Years vacation!

    The credit card terminal company management were all ex-bankers, now we understand how they operate.

  6. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Grenade

    Uncle Sam is "tax hungry" I see

    Oh yeah improper payments in dubious social environments and blah blah.

    Meanwhile, "Quantitative Easing 3" [aka. gavage of banksters with paper money] is looming.

  7. Chimp
    WTF?

    Ridiculous... All lies.

    No self respecting PRC Government employee would settle for such puny amounts. It costs a LOT to maintain a couple of mistresses, drink Lafite with lemonade and still have money left over for the baccarat tables in Macao.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Lower margins

      This is the IT industry, you know lower margins and all. They have to settle for a bit less.

      I think you're thinking about the construction or medical industries.

      Still you can get a good weekend out of the 1 million HKD (USD$128K ) casino VIP rooms. That's within the budget of any self respecting IT operation.

      It's correctly spelled Macau btw.

  8. ps2os2
    FAIL

    IBM or Nothing?

    As far as IBM being the only game in town is true. However a threat to get rid of IBM is usually done with the eye to convert to INTEL. There are long lines of failed conversions. Some of the better stories are at reboothill.com (IIRC) I haven't looked at it in a while and it has probably not been updated in forever.

    People who do the conversion (or try) are in for a shocker. No one have come in under budget (that I have heard of) and if the press is to believed more that a few have dropped back. What usually happens any person who proposed the conversion is vanished into India or some really backwater place.

    People just do not have clue what is involved the convresion. Amother piece that seems to be forgotten is how systems feed offf of each other. Documenation is lacking and the people that built the system are long gone. Which goes to the company being penny foolish they do not see the need to document anything. Leave for the next fool.

  9. Hans 1

    First-hand experience

    I was at a German customer as a consultant. They were upgrading an aging IBM AIX system and testing Windows Server on IBM hw and AIX on Power for the upgrade. The head of IT received a little packet, a USB thumb drive ... Microsoft-branded ... to help make the right decision? Who falls for that? The AIX system performed so well for them under heavy load that Microsoft was kicked out, so the USB thumb drive was futile. You don't really want to run Oracle DB on Windows, except on laptops for demos ... ;-). No, I wonder, what did IBM send?

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