Summary: Juniper pays $169,000,000 to bury a backdating scandal

FRAUD is more commonplace than people may realise, even fraud that's actually found and confirmed. When we wrote about Novell fraud [1, 2] and Microsoft fraud [1, 2] we also gave examples to show this. A couple of days ago we discovered the details of fraud at Juniper, which is run by former Microsoft executives [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Juniper is now paying to settle:

Backdating is the practice of retroactively changing the date of when employee stock options are granted to a time when the purchase price was lower to boost the recipient's profit. While backdating itself isn't illegal, it is when a company fails to disclose the compensation costs to government regulators and shareholders.

The class-action lawsuit claims that from June 1999 through 2003, Juniper's former general counsel Lisa Berry and other Juniper executives concealed a backdating scheme that resulted in the overstatement of income from 1999 to mid-2006, eventually requiring the company to pay $894.7m in pretax charges.

To be fair, the fraud had happened before Microsoft entryism, but still, it doesn't look too good. Microsoft is sometimes directly involved in such embarrassing scandals, even recently [1, 2, 3]. ⬆

"I do hope that the suit can help demonstrate that Microsoft's claims of succeeding through innovation are a complete fraud. Their only innovation has been in inventing predatory business practices. Other than that, they have been perhaps the greatest borrowers in the history of the software industry."

--Sybase Chairman Mitchell Kertzman