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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.'"
Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...
Okay, I'm not really seeing the story. Criminal breaks law. Criminal gets caught. Criminal gets sent to jail. News at 11?
Seriously, what's so interesting about this story? Was it a famous company? Sure he got a lot of money in fraud, but is that in and of itself really that interesting?
-1, Offtopic.
Pretty please?
With gigs of flash on top??
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
He's not going to make it to the White Castle after all...
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
CA boss? California? Organized crime? What? When 'CA' means C.A., something's wrong.
When in doubt, head to Wikipedia
Disclaimer: Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors.
CA = Computer Associates for those who are WTFing.
There is a code glitch to the best of my knowledge. I got mod points a couple days ago and I used three of them before they were due to expire, and it it four days after the fact and I still have the ones that I haven't used.
"So what's the problem, do people just not care anymore, or is it an issue with the moderating system?"
It's an issue with the moderating system (which was put together by Diebold).
Here's an analogy to express my feelings on this: I'm drinking in a bar. Outside, people are walking the streets, beers in hand. I walk outside and the cops bust me for breaking the city's open container law, while hundreds of people mill around me with drinks. A little selective enforcement. Did I do something wrong?
We have an overwhelming culture of corruption in this country, at the pinnacle of which are the directors and executives of major corporations. We let these guys get away with anything. SEC investigation is a joke. If Kumar was white, he would've walked. Instead, he gets thrown under the bus. Compared to the thievery and murder that the W mafia is carrying out in the name of the American people, overstating revenue is like jaywalking. Stealing from the ultrarich is what he's being punished for, but mostly it's just a token corporate prosecution.
The whole thing disgusts me. Ken Lay's family is drinking champagne and eating caviar, probably with Ken himself (anyone who believes he's really dead is an idiot), bought with the money Enron stole from me, my fellow Californians, the taxpayers of America, their employees, and countless others.
Just a minor comment on the article wording. Kumar did, in fact, "[face] life in prison." He just didn't receive it. As a writer, I'm dismayed by this error. I know what you meant, but the article is technically inaccurate.
;^)
Feel free to mod this into oblivion.
--
Toro
...putting a worthless sack of shit in prison for the rest of his life, where he can't continue to fuck people over is a bad thing...
Although letting some of his former employees get 20 unsupervised minutes alone with him would serve the same purpose... even better, when they're done with him, we wouldn't have to spend tax dollars to feed him.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I shouldn't have to click through a link to find out what an acronym means, especially because it's the only acronym used in the writeup. For the love of god, just because this is a nerd website does not automatically mean that everyone already knows that CA apparently stands for "Computer Associates".
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
They have TV commercials, print ads, etc. Not completely unreasonable to except a tech related web site might assume people know who "IBM" or "MS" or "CA" is. Personally I would have spelled the entire name unless space was an issue (rarely on a website).
I notice this as well. Also I get much, much, much less modpoints. It used to be every two weeks or so, now every two months.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In Canada... a rapist gets 6 years and gets out after 3... In the US... you fraud... you get 12 years ... and you do 12 years...
Don't fraud in the US!
Kumar's phone. Kumar speaking.
Hey, what's up? It's me. What are you doing?
Nothing important. I can talk. What's going on?
Listen, I can't party tonight, okay? I gotta stay late at the prosecutor's office.
Dude, fuck that shit. We had plans.
I know, but I got a lot of work to do drawing up your sentence for securities fraud.
When has getting high ever prevented you from doing your work?
Jesus!
I got a quarter of the finest herb in New York City. I'm not smoking that shit alone, okay? So you need to just chill the fuck out and prepare to get blazed, because in the next couple of hours, I expect both of us to be blitzed out of our skulls, got it?
All right, I got it.
I'll talk to you later, some guy with handcuffs is at the door.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Yeah, used to be (BEFORE THE NEW CSS REDESIGN), I would get mod points once every two weeks or so -- these days, I haven't seen a single invite to moderate. I think there are a lot of people like me who have been "forgotten' buy the new slashcode, and we don't get to moderate anymore.
Maybe someone should do an "ask slashdot" story for that one!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers isn't white? Ken Lay (Take off your tin foil hat, he's dead.) et al are not white? Former Tyoc CFO Mark Swartz isn't white? He's doing 8 and a half. Going way, way back, Robert Vesco is sort of white-ish. Terrence D. Chalk of CEO of Compulinx (see the Slashdot story yesterday) is white... Read the papers, and listen to the evening news, lot's of white guys are going to jail.
Are you for real?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
IBM and CA aren't even in the same league. As for MS, I'm assuming that means Microsoft, but that's a rather uncommon abbreviation ... generally Microsoft just isn't abbreviated, or if it is, they use the stock ticker, which is MSFT.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I guess I'm in the minority then because I've been on this site for a looong itme and CA is the first acronym that I had no idea what it meant. Kept thinking "wtf is with a California boss". :(
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
American Corporation: You have two cows. You sell one to a subsidiary company and lease it back to yourself so you can declare it as a tax loss. Your bosses give you a huge bonus. You inject the cows with drugs and they produce four times the normal amount of milk. Your bosses give you a huge bonus. When the drugs cause one of the cows to drop dead you announce to the press that you have down-sized, reducing expenses by 50 percent. The company stock goes up and your bosses give you a huge bonus. You lay off all your workers and move your production facilities to Mexico. You get a huge bonus. You contribute some of your profit to the President's re-election campaign. The President announces tax cuts for corporations in order to stimulate the economy.
I seem to get weekly modpoints. Be afraid..be very afraid!
CA is still a crappy consulting headshop to work for, and they still mooch a lot of business for supporting mainframe tools for shops who are still using z/OS on their mainframes and haven't completely converted over to Linux on their s/390 hardware yet.
As for MS, I'm assuming that means Microsoft, but that's a rather uncommon abbreviation
::sigh::
CA is the name of this software company. It was known as Computer Associates, Intl. about a year ago.
Yeah, it's a troll, but it's a decent troll, so I'm gonna respond anyway. Aside from the fact that using the term "frat party" in association with Clinton rather than Bush is the height of irony, you also act like it was actually something that Bush just did all on his own. Sorry, but that's just stupid. If something like Enron had happened when Clinton was in office, he and the Congress would have had to take action as well. It simply wasn't something that could be ignored. We could debate all day whether they would have done more or less than Bush, or whether their solutions would have been better or worse, but that's just speculation. When corruption gets that blatant and causes so much financial ruin, and makes headlines for months, the politicians have to get off their asses and do something if they don't want to go down too. That's all that happened. Nothing unusual. Nothing special. Nothing worthy of praise. Just a lot of ass-covering. The usual.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Worst backup solution ever.
Kumar is a clambot? Are you sure of that?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
the $8mil fine is, frankly, a joke compared to the money he has got in the bank.
Well, with a criminal conviction, you can expect investor lawsuits to leave him destitute. In the case of fraud, I doubt that he can even get the homestead exemption.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
with this sort of deal they get told to turn up for prison in a few months time. Anyone else gets found guilty and slammed away. Executive crime OTOH seems to involve giving them plenty of time to get their affairs in order or simply disappear, as desired. TBH, If I was a very rich dude and had been given 8 years in jail, I'd be tempted to disappear.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
>Mr. Kumar is expected to begin serving time in February 2007
Its more sporting to give him four months to get to the mexico and then a plane to India. He is white-collar after all...
My little Linux and tech blog
A company I worked for was taken over by CA. The CA accounting office routinely screwed up the expense reports of the consultants. They are into my knickers for over $3,000 in unpaid expenses. I feel this was due to orders from the top, Chuck Wang and Sanjay Kumar. One of the standard topics of former CA consultants was how much they had been taken for. This routine works because CA, like all corporations, forces employees to take a credit card as a personal card and to pay expenses out of pocket if the expense report isn't paid. Another employer got me for over $10,000 because the 'computer lost the reports'. I finally got some of it because I racked down the hotel receipts and refiled the reports, some of them three times.
Too lazy to create a sig...
> I seem to get weekly modpoints.
Do you meta-moderate? How often do you visit Slashdot per day? Please tell us your secret to unlimited mod points.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Sorry, but it seems that there is no connection of Charles Wang having ever been involved:
7 oct30,0,5725636.story?coll=ny-business-print
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzwang30495326
It appears that he and Kumar had differences in opinion, which led to Wang being drawn out of the company and a separation in their business relationships.
Kumar got such a long sentence because the wrong people got screwed.
In all likelihood, there were some very influential people that were aware of their shenanigans, but got blindsided by the downfall.
These people expect prior notice so they can quietly withdraw their funds and leave the little guy to get the shaft. The game is carefully orchestrated and - if you don't play by the rules - you get 12 years in the pokey.
The uber rich do not lose money on theirinvestments. If they do, heads roll!
"the judge called that punishment [life in prison] 'unreasonable.'"
Clearly the judge has never installed ARCserve...
India is the most corrupt place I have ever heard of. Conversations with indians that I work with amaze me every time with how corrupt it is there.
I've also heard Fuck = Fornication Under Consent of the King, which is pretty much the opposite of the Van Halen version. I have no idea which is true (if either), and this is completely off-topic, but WTH :-)
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Or maybe Graham Wellington was able to pick it up?
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
As long as we're already off topic...I've noticed as well that there seems to be a lot less mod participation lately. And yesterday, I had a comment modded +1 insightful which later was recinded. I thought I was losing my mind until I got an e-mail notification stating that it was most likely caused by someone modding the comment, then posting in the thread which would invalidate the mod point.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
because that was the heart of Sanjay's scam.
;)
and don't start the clock until a 35-day month is reached
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Neither one is true, Fuck has been in the English language for centuries. "[Origin: 1495-1505; akin to MD fokken to thrust, copulate with, Sw dial. focka to copulate with, strike, push, fock penis]" (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fuck) It is not an acronym. Read your way down to the bottom of the link for the first known use of the word in print.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look here, dingleberry, Enron DID commit its crimes while Clinton was in office, same as Worldcom, same as Tyco, etc. That was my point. Don't forget that Bush didn't take office until January 2001, by which time Enron had been a criminal enterprise for five full years.
Bush's Justice Department cleaned up the mess, beginning less than a year after he took office. He did in a matter of months what Clinton neglected to do for five years. How saying this can be called a troll is beyond me; it's a matter of public record.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Yes, but Sanjay was in the US and CA was an American company. He should have acted like an American. American execs are never corrupt.
Oh wait....
Julia Cameron
Oich ù agus hiùraibh éile
Thanks! I am now an educated fucker.
I am also highly intrigued by the adjective form, fucky. I'm not familiar with this usage, but am interested in seeing how many times I can slip it into conversation this weekend.
Grandma is in for a surprise.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Sanjay is from Sri Lanka.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
So what? If their crimes hadn't come to light, then how was anyone supposed to do anything? Bush didn't do a damn thing to speed up the process of Enron's downfall. If anything, Lay's friends in his administration may have helped them to get away with it longer. None of that is proveable, but the point is that you act like Bush swept into office and started enacting reforms that took down Enron. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush and the DOJ reacted AFTER Enron imploded. He didn't do a damn thing until then, so quit implying that he's somehow the good guy and Clinton is the bad guy. Neither one would have done anything if the scandals hadn't collapsed of their own accord. If so many people's financial lives hadn't been destroyed by these scandals, then we probably wouldn't have seen much reaction at all.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
They provide maintenance services for dead product lines that have existing service and support contracts for their production systems
Not true for 100% of their products. In 1993, when they acquired the Ingres DBMS system, it was second only to Oracle and was sold to them because the parent company, Ask, got into financial trouble over another product. However, on selling Ingres to CA, the perception immediately was "Ingres is dead" and so, within a year it was effectively dead. It was rebranded as CA-OpenIngres and quietly slipped out of sight. The dregs were released as open source just over 18 months ago, IIRC.
My broader point is that Bush is routinely blamed by the Left for things that took place before he became President. Hell, I've even seen Bush blamed for corporate monkeyshines that took place in the early 90's, before he held any public office at all.
It's not just that Bush had Enron blow up in his face almost immediately after his inauguration, and then was pilloried by the Democrats for not doing anything sooner about corporate greed, when Clinton's crew had eight years to do something about it and did zip. No, he was also blamed loudly and repeatedly for a recession that was already under way in 2000, and was only reinforced by 9/11. Remember the way Kerry hammered him for all the jobs lost in the recession? A recession that started under Clinton? Now that the recovery is well under way and more than 6 million jobs have been gained thanks to Bush policies (especially on taxes), the media circus has moved on and it's no longer news.
It pisses me off, and I refuse to let half-baked perceptions manufactured by a biased media trump reality. Bush has performed admirably, under circumstances far more difficult than anything party boy Clinton ever faced. Like Truman, he will be regarded far more highly by history than by the lazy, selfish, ill-informed chattering classes of his own times.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
It's one thing to say that Bush wasn't to blame for the scandals; that much I can go with. It's quite another thing to then turn and blame Clinton for them. It was no more his fault than Bush's. He didn't act for the same reason that Bush didn't act before the scandals broke. Neither of them knew that there was any real problem, and so neither had a reason to act before the information became public and suddenly there was good reason to start investigating. And if you want to get right down to it, the policies that allowed such fraud to go on for so long without being detected were put in place long before Clinton was in office too. So no, I don't think you can blame either one of them for not detecting the problem before anyone else did.
Come on. We all know that politics are ugly. The Republicans use the exact same tactics, so it's not like they have some moral high ground here. Both sides always try to blame the other for damn near everything. Both sides lie, cheat and steal. If you believe otherwise, you're just deluding yourself.
That's the real problem with politics today. Everyone seems so eager to latch onto one side or the other and try to defend their side regardless of what they do. They delude themselves into believing that their side is somehow morally superior despite all of the hypocrisy and screwups. Want to know what pisses me off? People who won't face reality and realize that there are stupid, greedy, corrupt, immoral assholes on both sides of the aisle.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Who were the other players in the Enron game? Well if you recall, our congress critters made a stink for a little bit about an investigation, then it quietly went away. Why - they quickly found that members of both parties were a little too close to the flame. I recall Robert Rubin at Citibank in NY - Former Treasury secretary - sought to have the notification delayed a day or so. Citibank lost over 800 Million when Enron collapsed. It's not likely congress critters or even the president - no, the people that get you 25 years then kill you before you even get a chance to report to prison buy and sell congress critters with their pocket change. A good place to start would be the Forbes 400 list. The other place is mob entities (US, Russian, etc) that can suggest to judges and persecuters that they really should take a hard line - lest the news media find some interesting information / photos / etc.
Yeah, I know - conspiracy theorist - I really need a more challenging career.
They're probably all Firehosing.
You're right about the moderating.