Bonum Certa Men Certa

From Belarus With Love — Part I: Schizophrenic EPO Policy

Series parts:

  1. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Schizophrenic EPO Policy


Belarusian Campinos
António's statement about Russian "military intervention" in the Ukraine caused a bit of a stir inside the EPO, but so far he is keeping very quiet about the EPO's connections to the Belarusian IT sector.



Summary: The EPO's management must be terrified of EPO stakeholders discovering that they help fund Belarus [PDF]

On 1 March 2022 EPO President António Campinos issued a public statement (warning: epo.org link) about the "ongoing military action" and "appalling violence" in the Ukraine.



According to inside sources, the statement was drafted in close collaboration with the Administrative Council Chairman, Josef Kratochvil, and the President of the Boards of Appeal, Carl Josefsson.

"According to inside sources, the statement was drafted in close collaboration with the Administrative Council Chairman, Josef Kratochvil, and the President of the Boards of Appeal, Carl Josefsson."Some people are wondering whether Campinos also undertook a courtesy consultation with the Russian authorities before going public.

This is because the EPO's diplomatically formulated statement avoids using the word "war" - apparently in pre-emptive compliance with new Russian censorship laws that came into force a couple of days later.

In his statement, Campinos announced that the EPO would "freeze our co-operation activities with the national patent offices of the Federation of Russia and of Belarus, as well as to put on hold our co-operation activities with the Eurasian Patent Organisation".

In the meantime, some eagle-eyed observers have noted that Campinos has remained silent about the EPO's long-standing connections to the Belarusian IT sector.

There's nothing new or secret about these connections. As a matter of fact they go back quite a long way to the Benoît Battistelli era. But so far they have escaped any real scrutiny, both within the EPO and outside.

In June 2016, Techrights reported on the scandalous case of "Money Flying to Private Companies Without Tenders at Battistelli’s EPO".

That article contained a fleeting reference to one of the leading beneficiaries of this largesse, namely a company called SaM Holding GmbH reportedly based at "Gilching, near Starnberg" (close to Munich).

However, the "corporate headquarters" of SaM Holding GmbH in Gilching is something of a Potemkin façade.

"...some eagle-eyed observers have noted that Campinos has remained silent about the EPO's long-standing connections to the Belarusian IT sector."SaM Holding GmbH is the parent company of a Minsk-based IT company that was founded in 1993 by a group of graduates from the Belarus State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics.

The SaM group's organisational structure with its "head office" in Gilching near Munich cleverly conceals a "nearshore" coding operation whose "delivery center" is located in the Belarusian capital Minsk.

Gilching
Gilching – a village near Munich providing a Potemkin façade which cleverly conceals a Belarusian software company.



The clue is in the name SaM which stands for "Software aus Minsk" a German moniker meaning "Software from Minsk".

SaM Solutions praise
SaM Solutions lists the European Patent Office as one of its "blue chip" clients.



In its company presentations, the SaM group has always been eager to let the world know about its business relationship with the European Patent Office which it lists as one of its selected clients. The company appears to takes great pride in a glowing testimonial which it received from the EPO.

SaM Solutions clients
A glowing testimonial to SaM Solutions from the EPO.



For understandable reasons, the EPO has never been quite as keen about advertising its reciprocal connections to the Belarusian IT sector.

In the light of recent developments - in particular, Belarusian participation in Putin's "special military operation" in the Ukraine – Team Campinos is probably going to be even more concerned about ensuring that this "open secret" doesn't attract unwanted public attention.

"...Team Campinos is probably going to be even more concerned about ensuring that this “open secret” doesn’t attract unwanted public attention."But for people concerned about transparency, it seems like the right time to shine a spotlight on the EPO's Belarusian software "outsourcing" partner, SaM Solutions.

Our story begins with a look at the efforts of Belarusian despot Alexander Lukashenko to "techwash" his autocratic regime by creating his own post-Soviet "Silicon Valley" in Minsk.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Lookout, It's Outlook
Outlook is all about the sharing!
Updated A Month Ago: Richard Stallman on Software Patents as Obstacles to Software Development
very recent update
Is BlueMail a Client of ZDNet Now?
Let's examine what BlueMail does to promote itself
OpenBSD Says That Even on Linux, Wayland Still Has a Number of Rough Edges (But IBM Wants to Make X Extinct)
IBM tries to impose unready software on users
 
The 'Smart' Attack on Power Grid Neutrality (or the Wet Dream of Tiered Pricing for Power, Essentially Punishing Poorer Households for Exercising Freedom Like Richer Households)
The dishonest marketing people tell us the age of disservice and discrimination is all about "smart" and "Hey Hi" (AI) as in algorithms akin to traffic-shaping in the context of network neutrality
Links 29/11/2023: VMware Layoffs and Too Many Microsofters Going Inside Google
Links for the day
Just What LINUX.COM Needed After Over a Month of Inactivity: SPAM SPAM SPAM (Linux Brand as a Spamfarm)
It's not even about Linux
Microsoft “Discriminated Based on Sexuality”
Relevant, as they love lecturing us on "diversity" and "inclusion"...
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 28, 2023
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Media Cannot Tell the Difference Between Microsoft and Iran
a platform with back doors
Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Links for the day
Justice is Still the Main Goal
The skulduggery seems to implicate not only Microsoft
[Teaser] Next Week's Part in the Series About Anti-Free Software Militants
an effort to 'cancel' us and spy on us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Permacomputing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Professor Eben Moglen on How Social Control Media Metabolises Humans and Constraints Freedom of Thought
Nothing of value would be lost if all these data-harvesting giants (profiling people) vanished overnight
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 27, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, November 27, 2023
When Microsoft Blocks Your Access to Free Software
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Techrights Statement on 'Cancel Culture' Going Out of Control
relates to a discussion we had in IRC last night
Stuff People Write About Linux
revisionist pieces
Links 28/11/2023: Rosy Crow 1.4.3 and Google Drive Data Loss
Links for the day
Links 27/11/2023: Australian Wants Tech Companies Under Grip
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 27/11/2023: Underwater Data Centres and Gemini, BSD Style!
Links for the day
[Meme] Leaning Towards the Big Corporate CoC
Or leaning to "the green" (money)
Software Freedom Conservancy Inc in 2022: Almost Half a Million Bucks for Three People Who Attack Richard Stallman and Defame Linus Torvalds
Follow the money
[Meme] Identity Theft and Forgery
Coming soon...
Microsoft Has Less Than 1,000 Mail (MX) Servers Left, It's Virtually Dead in That Area (0.19% of the Market)
Exim at 254,000 servers, Postfix at 150,774, Microsoft down to 824
The Web is Dying, Sites Must Evolve or Die Too
Nowadays when things become "Web-based" it sometimes means more hostile and less open than before
Still Growing, Still Getting Faster
Articles got considerably longer too (on average)
In India, the One Percent is Microsoft and Mozilla
India is where a lot of software innovations and development happen, so this kind of matters a lot
Feeding False Information Using Sockpuppet Accounts and Imposters
online militants try every trick in the book, even illegal stuff
What News Industry???
Marketing, spam, and chatbots
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 26, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, November 26, 2023
The Software Freedom Law Center's Eben Moglen Explains That We Already Had Free Software Almost Everywhere Before (Half a Century Ago)
how code was shared in the 1970s and 80s