Former CA Boss Gets 12 Years, $8M Fine

mwnyc writes "The BBC is reporting on the sentence issued today to former CA boss Sanjay Kumar, who had pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and securities fraud. Mr. Kumar is expected to begin serving time in February 2007. Under federal sentencing guidelines, Kumar could have faced life in prison but the judge called that punishment 'unreasonable.'"

Comments

Re:I'm not seeing the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly he should be sent to jail, but 12 years sounds like a lot of time, even if gets shortened for parole. This man cheated to make the quarterly numbers and lied to cover it up, but it doesn't sound like a totally corrupt, pulling the wool over investor's eyes like what occurred at Enron for instance.

Re:I'm not seeing the story

[spookymonster]

In 1995, Computer Associates (now known as CA) bought up nearly every third party MVS (IBM's mainframe OS) application. In the industry, it was seen as the death knell of the mainframe; it reduced the choice of software vendors down to 2 monolithic companies. On the one side, you had IBM with their over-complicated software (a study once found that the average IBM manual read at the post-grad level) selling at loss-leader prices. On the other side, you had CA buying up their competitors, then announcing those products were being twilighted in favor of their own 'best-of-breed' (read: 'largest profit margin') software.