SCO Asked O'Gara To Smear Groklaw

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty."

Comments

Ö'Gara fired?

[klingens]

How can Mrs. O'Gara be fired when her publisher touts her as:
"Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media."
at http://maureenogara.sys-con.com/

sys-con being the slimeballs^Wpublisher where the PJ hit piece was published 5 years ago and for which she was supposedly "fired".

Re:Ö'Gara fired?

[M. Baranczak]

Interesting - looks like they un-fired the bitch when nobody was looking.

The announcement of her firing is dated May 10, 2005. According to Sys-Con's archive, they did stop publishing her for a while, but she came back exactly one year and one day later. And it's also worth noting that the editors who forced her out are no longer working at Sys-Con.

Re:Ö'Gara fired?

[hardburn]

The fact that they rehired her later is no surprise. Back then, it was clear to everyone that SYS-CON had no clue why O'Gara's behavior was massively unethical, and only fired her because they got a lot of complaints (plus a claimed DoS, though their web sites never seemed to be down at any time). The editorial staff of the Linux branch of SYS-CON already didn't like her, and they all left over the issue.

Re:Fighting dirty is one thing

[bmo]

Bernie Madoff was pointed out repeatedly to the SEC and they did absolutely nothing.

If I have learned anything from the SCO case is that regulators are mostly lazy asses that only go after "high profile" celebrities (like Martha Stewart) to make it *look like* they're doing something. Nailing the Ivan Boeskys of the world comes once every 15 years. In between, it's business as usual.

Real thieves wear shiny suits and everyone looks the other way.

--
BMO

Re:SCO needs to more than die.

[Fnkmaster]

As I recall, it was proven that Microsoft arranged the Baystar investment by eWeek.

As for whose money sits in the Baystar Capital investment pool, there is no public disclosure requirement of such things for private equity firms and hedge funds. And it's a large fund, so it's clearly not just Microsoft people's money, but given the nature of the relationship documented between Baystar and the Microsoft people who brought this deal to them, I can assure you there's some money from senior Microsoft people there, at the very least.

In any case, the guys at Baystar realized they were pawns in a big game after a short while and pulled out what they could. See this story.

Basically they wrote off $37M of their investment for some common stock in SCO (hahaha). Which went on to finance SCO's legal actions for several more years before they finally went kaput.

Baystar, having invested over $1.5B in equity deals since inception, this was a relatively small write-off. Probably an annoying blip in their overall results, part of the price of cultivating their relationships with Microsoft senior executives.

Re:Assumed competence

[UnknowingFool]

Harry Markopolos who was the main Madoff whistle-blower said in a 60 minutes interview

"What I found out from my dealings with the SEC over eight and a half years is that their people are totally untrained in finance; they're unschooled; they're un-credentialed. Most of them are just merely lawyers without any financial industry experience," Markopolos said.

"Well, if the people there aren't trained in securities work, what are they trained in?" Kroft asked.

"How to look at pieces of paper that the securities laws require. They can check every piece of paper perfectly and find misdemeanors, and they'll miss all the financial felonies that are occurring because they never look there," Markopolos replied. "Even when pointed to fraud, they're incapable of finding fraud."

This was after Markopolos sent a 19 page memo to the SEC with 29 red flags that something was amiss with the Madoff operation. Some of the red flags that Markpolos listed were trivially easy to verify. For example, Madoff listed that he traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. However the volume of trades that Madoff was reporting meant he would have to do more trades on certain days than were posted on the entire exchange on those days. And not a single broker from the exchange remembered making a trade with Madoff ever. The SEC never talked to anyone on the exchange or verified the volumes.