Why do you say "INTL" in the headline? It's only one letter shorter than the complete name of the company and the stock ticker (if that's what you were going for) is INTC.
Reading this you'd think there is only one guilty party here, but in fact, there are two, and it is strange that Intel seems to get away without so much as a pointed finger.
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Did the SEC go after the Intel big shots too ? How come AMD doesn't get a slice of that fine, after all, it seems they're the wronged party here, not the SEC.
It looks like this particular case wasn't about the payments themselves being illegal, but an SEC investigation into Dell's accounting that found they were hiding the payments and then using the money to manipulate their quarterly earnings reports, which violated various accounting regulations.
Weird, you'd say that if the amounts were public knowledge that it would be easy to figure out the effect on Dells bottom line.
What bothers me about cases like this is that apparently successful companies will go to any length to maintain their stockprice when things are not-so-good for a relatively short period of time. A supplier paying for the privilege of using their product in order to harm a competitor should have been enough of a red-flag for anybody at Dell to stay miles away from it, after all, enough people knew about this that it would never be kept secret for ever (and the amounts are too large for that anyway).
The punishment for this kind of trickery should not just be a fine, it should be jail time for the execs involved.
There are 'free market extremists' that believe that the government should stay out of stuff like this, but just like in a regular game you need a referee the world of business unfortunately needs institutions like the SEC to govern the world of business.
The only reason they're getting involved here is because of the effect on the stock price, if Dell wasn't a public company this would not have raised an eyebrow.
From what I've read, they did. This all came out because of a giant anti-trust case against Intel a few years ago. Like some one else said, the ended with Intel giving like a Billion dollars to AMD. Then they started digging into how some of the payments Intel made were used which is how we now get to this Dell situation
The situation would be analogous to a meth addict who manages to kick the habit right before it kills him, I think.
I've lost a lot of respect for Michael over this news. He was taking the baksheesh from Intel at exactly the same time he was recommending that Apple be wound up and liquidated for lack of a viable business model. That took chutzpah he could have put to better use elsewhere in his own business.
I think he said that in 1997, not 2007. But if he had not done this deal, Steve Jobs would have been able to send his "well look at that, we're bigger than Dell" mail sooner.
