Alleged bad Appler pleads not guilty
Suppliers cough to consultancy fees
Paul Shim Devine, a 37-year old Apple manager, has pleaded not guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy charges related to accusations that he took a series of bribes from suppliers to help them win work from the computer and phone maker.
Devine, paid over $100,000 plus options by Apple, denied taking $2.5m from six companies since he started work at Apple in 2005. He was responsible for sourcing parts for iPhone and iPod headphones.
Apple has been investigating since April, although it is unclear what first aroused their suspicions, and checked Devine's Apple-supplied laptop.
On it were found Hotmail and Gmail accounts arranging payments through 14 different bank accounts. One mail warned a supplier not to use his work email account because: "Apple IT team will randomly scan-mails for suspicious e-mail."
The indictment included another mail which requested payments in parts of less than $10,000 in order to avoid suspicion, SJMercuryNews reports.
The companies include Kaedar Electronics of China, Taiwanese Pegatron, an Asus spin-off, and Cresyn.
Headphone supplier Cresyn of South Korea said it had a standard consultancy agreement with Devine and paid him $6,000 a month for information about general market trends.
According to the FT, Cresyn said: “An Apple manager offered to provide us with business consulting to help us advance into the US market. So we signed a normal consulting contract, which was not illegal. We received general information about the US market but did not receive any technology-related information.”
Apple accuses him of passing on confidential information and product plans in order to give the companies an unfair advantage when bidding for contracts.
The indictment also names Andrew Ang of Singapore, formerly employed by Jin Li Mould Manufacturing. ®
COMMENTS
Stupid?
How could anyone be so stupid as to leave any trace of such transactions on office equipment?
Look at his surname
He works for Apple, and has a surname "Devine". The poor man cannot have had much bandwidth left after the day to day management of such godly conflicts :-).
Looks like Cresyn needs a new consultant
For $6k a month I'll be happy to paraphrase news articles and blog posts, er... provide you with valuable market information that will be invaluable for your future business. Just remember that I'll need to be paid in used fivers.
I wouldn't be surprised
If Apple employees sign away rights to just about everything --- from personal e-mail to the children's schoolbooks!
Not even a keylogger needed
Dollars to donuts, it was that he was still logged on to gmail.com via cookies. And if it's on company hardware and through the company network, well, there'd be a huge paper trail at the router and remote administration enabled for IT purposes.
Given how aggressively Apple hunts down rumor mill leaks, I wouldn't be surprised if they stumbled across this while doing a scan for leaks to media.
