Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over Microsoft Licenses

"A former minister and three others have been handed jail sentences for corruption in Romania in a case linked to Microsoft software licenses," reports Balkan Insight. Prosecutors said the officials had embezzled the entire 47% discount Microsoft offered the Romanian government in a five-year, $105 million contract to supply schools and other public institutions with Microsoft Office licenses. Jail terms up to three years were also handed to a former mayor and two other businessmen who acted as middlemen, and the four defendants were also fined almost 10 million euros. While the court's sentence is not final, "prosecutors said there was manifest corruption in the contract," the article reports, with the officials admitting to the charges in exchange for a one-third reduction in their jail sentences.

Comments

Correction

[penguinoid]

Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over embezzlement.

Re:Correction

[Teun]

I believe the MS part is significant for transparency as a 47% discount means their catalogue price is fully unrealistic and others should be able to follow up.

Governments shouldn't use proprietary software

[Stormwatch]

It should be illegal for governments to use proprietary software in the first place. Do as you wish as an individual, or a private enterprise, but public data cannot be subjected to vendor lock-in. And as governments are supposed to serve the public good (wishful thinking much?), they should promote the development of Free software.

Re:Governments must stop paying private industry..

[lucm]

Governments have the resources to adapt and adopt open source software rather than paying MS billions of dollars across the globe.

Are you kidding?

Government IT always follows the same: each department/agency/division has their own IT turf that they protect against other department/agency/division, until some starry-eyed moron convinces the big cheese that having a central IT group would lower cost and could even become a profit center. At which point the central IT group becomes a nest of corruption showered with gifts from vendors, and every department/agency/division is charged ridiculous amounts of money for inferior or irrelevant products and services. So each department/agency/division starts special projects and bundles IT services in those, slowly recreating individual turfs. Rinse and repeat.

Re:Corporate corruption meets government corruptio

[lucm]

Just for fun call the US GAO and ask them to give you a ball park figure as to how much public money is wasted in the federal government. The answer is: they have no fucking idea how to even start figuring out an answer. The only true answer they can give is that there's 1/2 billion wasted each year in having a GAO.