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SCO Files To Amend Claims To IBM Case, Again
UnknowingFool writes "SCO filed a motion to allow it to change its claims against IBM. Again. A brief recap: In December 2005, SCO was supposed to finally list all claims against IBM. This was the Final Disclosure. In May 2006, SCO filed its experts reports to the court which discussed subjects beyond those in the Final Disclosure. Naturally, IBM objected and wanted to remove certain allegations. Judge Wells ruled from the bench and granted IBM's motion: SCO's experts cannot discuss subjects that were not in the Final Disclosure. Now, SCO wants to amend the December 2005 Final Disclosure to include other allegations."
SCO paid cold hard cash for their lawyers. Cash from Microsoft and Sun that Novell is claiming should have been forwarded to Novell. But it was cash. There was an early move to make BS&F get paid in shares and a percentage of an SCO buyout. BS&F dropped that very quickly, either because they got a good look at SCO's case or because it would put them in co-conspirator type position with respect to Lanham act and racketering charges for being a direct benefit from the false valuation.
SCO paid a "fixed fee" to BS&F to manage all cases through appeals, I believe it was $29M. There is also a refillable misc-costs bucket of $5M that has already been topped up twice. The misc-cost bucket sort of puts a lie to the "fixed fee" handling of the lawsuit.
In any case SCO is now facing Novell asking for a lot of cash that SCO no longer has.
I wonder. if a quick buy out of the company would enable the buyer to see all paper work? It may be useful for IBM and Novell to have the goods on MS and Sun for damages as well as perhaps put those at the top who perpertraited this crime in prison. I wonder how Gates (or Balmer) and McNealy would do in a federal prison?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All of the money made by the insiders is public knowledge. I quickly looked through the records last week (you can just do a google search for "insider trades SCO" and you will find a service that will list them all). From what I can tell, Baystar dumped about a million shares or so at between $3.50 and $4.00 at the end of 2004 (They were making 5 or 6 sell trades a day for months). I'm not sure if this ended up being a profit or a loss though (I forget the details... and the whole Bank of Montreal involvement made everything kind of complicated anyway).
The executives exercised stock options all the way up until the end of 2004. It seems they were mostly granted at between $1 and $2 and excercised for between $10 and $20, but there are some exceptions. I didn't add up all the money, but it was definitely in the multi-millions of dollars.
There are huge stock grants to a law firm (about 10 million shares), which I think is the law firm representing them (I assume for services rendered). So the absolute big winners seem to be the lawers, but the executives and Baystar seem to have made millions as well. The losers are the people who invested at anything over $4 (or the morons who sold short, not understanding that it takes *time* for a stock to fall).
As a disclaimer, I only quickly reviewed this material, so there may be errors in my summary. If you care about this stuff, I suggest you compile it properly yourself.