LightSquared CEO Resigns Amid Appearance of Bribery

New submitter msauve writes "LightSquared, the company who's request to use make use of spectrum in a way likely to interfere with GPS was recently denied, has suffered another setback. CEO Sanjiv Ahuja has now resigned, only a week after a report detailing political contributions and the personal financial interests of Obama and officials in his administration in SkyTerra, the precursor company to LightSquared. Ahuja's one and only contribution to the Democratic Party occurred on the same day he tried to arrange a meeting with Obama administration officials, apparently as part of LightSquared's desire to fast track FCC approval of a change beneficial to the company."

Comments

Important to note

[geekoid]

He attempt to do what many /.ers say happen all the time, and got busted.

Re:Important to note

[GrumpySteen]

The only thing 'funny' about it is that LightSquared's CEO didn't anything for his 'donation'. No private audience with Obama and no fast-track approval for the company's idiotic plan.

The Democratic Party took the donation and treated it as a donation while the administration killed the company, which is exactly what should have happened. For once, the system worked as intended.

Re:Important to note

[im_thatoneguy]

I don't buy the "Bribery" angle that's just more anti-obama birther nonsense.

It's true that the Democratic party received about $20k from Falcone in 2010. But the Republican Party received nearly $50k in 2008.

If you go through his political contributions he tended to shotgun across party lines. And none of the money in 08 was for Obama. It was almost exclusively for Senatorial candidates and Giuliani and Chris Dodd.
http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/philip-falcone.asp?cycle=08

And yes I do imagine there was some Lightsquared/Obama white house conversations--One of Obama's campaign promises was broadband for all. Lightsquared promised to deliver on that promise for the president. I'm unaware of another company which Lightsquared favoritism would have pushed out of business. By the very nature of their technology it seemed that there *can't* be a competitor since they themselves don't work. ;)

Re:Important to note

[Straif]

F&F did not involve legal gun sales that just happened to end up being misused, it involved illegal gun sales to suspected traffickers. Gun store owners were directly instructed to illegally sell guns and were told that the ATF would be tracking them. The owners were actually very wary about making the sales but were instructed to keep selling by the ATF agents in charge.

So people are crying foul because A) the ATF had to instruct shop owners to disregard local, state and federal laws to sell the guns in question, B) there was no real program in place to track the illegally sold guns which led to terrible consequences and C) people in Washington are already using F&F as an excuse to talk about toughening gun laws even though the laws in place to prevent just such sales had to be expressly ignored to allow the program to take place.