Dell Settles With the SEC For $100M

Sri.Theo writes in with news of Dell's humbling settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The core of the complaint is that Dell took secret payments from Intel to keep AMD's chips out of Dell's machines. The SEC calls it "accounting irregularities" — Dell was dipping into this secret slush fund to bolster its results, quarter by quarter. At one point the payments from Intel made up 76% of Dell's quarterly operating income. "For years, Dell's seemingly magical power to squeeze efficiencies out of its supply chain and drive down costs made it a darling of the financial markets. Now it appears that the magic was at least partly the result of a huge financial illusion. ... According to the commission, Dell would have missed analysts' earnings expectations in every quarter between 2002 and 2006 were it not for accounting shenanigans. ... (Intel is expected to settle a long-running anti-trust case that has highlighted these payments in the next couple of weeks.) ... Michael Dell... and Kevin Rollins, a former boss of the company, agreed to each pay a $4m penalty without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations."

Comments

So what?

[SuperKendall]

PS: That 'perfect steak' was probably dropped on the floor at some point...and in the small restaurant business the hygiene rules are for losers.

The perfection in the steak is about how it is cooked, nothing else matters. I don't care if it was dropped on the floor or served on old cracked plates. Why should it matter?

For you dropping the steak somehow spoiled it despite it being perfectly cooked and edible. Why are you so shallow and wasteful? Would you not eat it if the same thing happened at home? It's attitudes like this that really bother me, the willingness to destroy something perfectly usable because of lofty yet meaningless standards.