14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like HP isn't the only 'blue' company to be accused of bribery, as IBM has been charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with bribing quite a few officials between 1,998 and 2003.
The IT market is definitely no stranger to lawsuits, as legal battles have been sprouting and closing every year, many of them, ironically, starting during the holiday season, especially in the month of December.
This once the legal action taken against IBM is not one of patent infringement or any sort of duel with another IT player, although there are enough of those in progress already.
Instead, the world-class brand was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with having bribed officials in China and Korea. The outfit allegedly used offers of free travel, entertainment and other sorts of boons.
For instance, China employees were said to be working with a local travel agency in order to fake invoices, in addition to IBM subsidiaries creating “slush funds” that allowed officials to benefit from any of the above-mentioned gifts.
There is even a more serious allegation, that South Korean employees, back in 1998, delivered $19.000 to a government persona in a shopping bag.
All in all, IBM is implied to have spent a total of $207,000 in South Korea (between 1998 and 2003), while the bribes in China started a bit more recently.
The company, understandably, claimed that it insists on the highest ethical standards and has policies and procedures in place to make sure employees conduct business fairly.
It is, of course, likely that the bribing was not really part of the company's plans, but that it lacked, at least for a time, internal means of control that would prevent such actions. Either way, IBM agreed to pay SEC the sum of $10 million as a fine.