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Infineon Execs Plead Guilty to Price-Fixing
An anonymous reader writes "Executives at Infineon Technologies plead guilty to an international conspiracy to fix prices in the DRAM market. Heinrich Florian, Günter Hefner, Peter Schaefer and T. Rudd Corwin, executives for Infineon Technologies, had a felony filed against them yesterday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Each executive could spend up to six months in prison and will have to pay a $250,000 fine. Under the plea agreement, they must also assist the government in its DRAM investigation. Infineon agreed in October to pay a $160 million fine for its role in the conspiracy, according to the Justice Department."
If there has been a widespread "price-fixing", will there be any refund for those who has bought these overpriced memory devices?
Is this surprising?
The rest of the world is getting obese just like Americans... everyone is greedy to a point. Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
What the heck will it take? Evolution of the human species? I always think back to those old Star Trek episodes where they land on some planet where the inhabitants laugh kindly at Earth's culture because they have learned to live without greed, take care of everyone, and actually enjoy sex rather than codify it.
I don't know why I want to write this... mod at your leisure.
We need stiffer penalties against crimes like this. 6 months and $250,000? These execs stand to make tons more conducting illegal business than what they'll have to give up if they get caught. There has to be many more companies using illegal business practices in the US to get ahead, they just haven't been caught yet. This sentencing doesn't seem like it will be a real deterrent for that kind of behavior either.
I can't help but remember the time when there was a glut of RAM, too many factories were built and RAM was cheap. Yes, that was good, in the short term, but the problem was that the low price lead to manufacturers going out of business and prices shot up.
The RAM industry is harsh. It's a commodity, and there's probably little profit in it. Little enough to make starting up a RAM factory, or updating the tech, a big financial risk. Above all we need stability in it.
Yes, market economies are good, but not perfect. Maybe this is an example where some amount of regulation is required to assure a steady supply of quality RAM? In a sense, price fixing can be compared to regulation. It's usually illegal and often undesirable, but maybe sometimes it serves a purpose?
Yes, I'd like to get cheap RAM, but not at the expense of quality, innovation or stability. It may be bad for us in the long run that Infineon is going out of business. As I understand it, the market is dominated by four major players. Will there be three now? Will it eventually become even more of a monopoly? I hope not. It would be to our detriment.
Off topic - I wonder when DDR2 is going to ramp up to the point where it's actually better than DDR. From what I've seen, the extra latency kills any performance gains it might have with current chipsets and clock speeds.
Anyone think the Infineon execs will take this as badly as the CEO of CyberNET (see this article)??
It somewhat still amazes me that these people think because they are supposedly good at business that they are going to be good at breaking the law. At what point does making an amazingly fat paycheck stop a person from wanting more? As incidences like these continue to happen, I get closer and closer to believing it never ends... and that's not even mentioning the big ones like Enron and MCI.
Here's a vote to salary caps in the corporate world!!!
Because MS is an American company, so the DOJ/US Gov't make money off MS. Infineon is an "evil company" because they're "foreign", and taking advantage of us poor Americans. If it's the other way around, the DOJ doesn't give a damn. Plus, the DOJ is currently too worried about porn.
This translates into:
Infineon stole so much that they could easily pay a $160 million cut to the government, who wanted their share, even though they did nothing to deserve it. In return they let the company continue to do business as usual, and suggest that they price fix in less obvious ways next time. They also asked the company to offer up a few scape goats, who would get a token amount of time in a federal luxury prison like Camp Cupcake or Club Fed, but would be out in even less time than Martha Stewart. The people who bought the artifically high priced memory get screwed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
See, what confuses me is that other felons aren't allowed to profit from their felonies. That's why drug dealer's houses and cars and boats are taken away. But, these execs still get to keep what they earned during the time they were committing their felonies (minus the 3 months pay they're being fined). I guess it's just more proof that crime does pay.