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

Re:Important to note

[ColdWetDog]

Actually it was only 8K for the Senate seat. The Dems returned $20,000.

Must have been running a special that week.

Re:I knew it was too good to be true.

[OverlordQ]

You know, really depressing thing I've found is that there appears to be no proof of this allegation. The accusation enough seems to have been sufficient to stop anyone from even trying to prove it.

Because there isn't anything to prove, it's basic physics. But to appease shills like you, they did do that test.

Re:I knew it was too good to be true.

[Baloroth]

You've obviously not been looking hard enough. The Ars Technica article sums up the science behind it pretty well (basically, they did a test run of the terrestrial base-stations and it interfered with ~75% of GPS devises, after LightSquared reduced the stations power to try to fix the problem). There is a ton of proof that they actually interfere with GPS signals, namely, actual experiments.

Re:Important to note

[steelfood]

He wasn't doing it right.

First off, at that level, he needs to start bri *ahem* making campaign donations to everybody, not just to the President. Senators, congressmen, judges, even the ones running the party all need their cut. And he needs to be doing it over multiple election years.

A few thousand dollars doesn't cut it anymore these days--at least not at the Federal level. To play in that game, he needs a warchest of at least half a million.

Additionally, he needed a lobbying firm to do the dirty work on his behalf. If it was a lobbying firm who did the brib *ahem* gift-giving instead, he would be shielded from all this by plausible deniability and would have kept his job. He could've just fired the lobbying firm and re-hired them under a different company name *ahem* I mean find another one.

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

[hairyfeet]

Sadly F&F was nothing under Bush, and Solyndra was just the tip of a VERY stinky iceberg, one of the Kennedy kids got millions in tax free handouts for a "green' company that had never made a single dime. I'd google it for you but I'm just about to head out the door "Solyndra tip of iceberg" in any search engine will find the info for you. Summary 19 out of the 20 companies that got huge handouts were significant donors to the elect Obama fund. I'm a democrat and hated Bush but Obama is trying his damnedest to be worse than Bush in EVERY single way, worse on human rights, worse on jack booted crap, worse on bribery, hell i can't think of a single thing the man did better and that's just fricking sad. if you want to see what changed read this. Frankly I'm voting green rather than waste my vote on such a lousy POTUS. don't worry he'll still win simply nobody is gonna vote for mittens.

Re:Implications for the administration?

[vlm]

For them to offer conditional approval later shows someone was pushing for Lightsquared to succeed.

They appear to be crooks and what they're doing was a dumb idea from a tech standpoint ... but... from personal experience the FCC will license almost anyone to do almost anything on a conditional experimental non-interfering basis. I know this goes against /. group think about the govt, but at least WRT to temporary conditional experimental licenses the FCC has always been very libertarian, perhaps the most so of all the fedgov, maybe more than all the rest of the fedgov put together.

The way its supposed to work, for a real world example, is 20 ham radio guys who know what they're doing, get a temporary experimental license to F around near the now unused traditional 500 KHz marine radio band, mostly trying to figure out how they can do it without interfering with any remaining primary users (if any?). Then the experiment ends and everyone goes away, more or less happy. Someday, maybe Very Soon the data those guys gathered will get the hams a 500 KHz allocation ... or maybe not. What LS did instead of basically a big lab experiment, was get their standard off the shelf FCC response of "go out there, F around, and for gods sake don't break anything and stop the moment I tell you to" permission slip that anyone else can get for the asking, and then used it to raise Billions of dollars and make campaign contributions and then started crying unfair when it turns out it didn't work out.

Its not like the FCC was "pushing" just for LS, they pretty much rubber stamp any non-totally stupid experimental request. LS is just crying because the experiment failed and they owe Billions and though thousands in campaign contributions would fix it. Millions in bribes might have. But thousands? Not gonna work.

Re:Important to note

[HornWumpus]

Had it been left entirely up to the FCC they would have made their money.

Their mistake was underestimating the strength of the push back from the GPS users and manufacturers.

That and overestimating the power of law. They thought all they had to do was bribe someone to change the laws of physics.