While US Government Greenlights (or Bluelights) Bailouts for IBM Some Foreign Governments Blacklist It

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 26, 2026

Can IBM keep it up after bailouts?

Last week: Government Bailouts Won't be Enough to Save IBM

This week: IBM Bailouts and the IBM People Inside the Administration

There's news this week that the Dutch government blocks sale of DigiD owner to IBM's Kyndryl. Or as Reuters has put it: "Dutch government to block takeover of cloud services company Solvinity by US-based Kyndryl"

Quoting an English-speaking but Dutch site:

The Dutch government has blocked the sale of Solvinity, the company that manages its online services portal DigiD, to the US-based tech giant Kyndryl amid concerns that millions of citizens’ private data could be compromised.

Willemijn Aerts, the junior minister responsible for the digital economy, vetoed the takeover “to protect the public interest”. She had asked the BTI, the agency that vets cross-border investments, to assess the risk of the deal to national security.

With unrest inside the company, allegedly looted by its managers, it's easy to consider it inseparable from IBM. Even the managers are the same. Same accounting, same fraud. In light of the explanation of the alleged fraud, someone has just posted this update:

Silence is the default state right now—and for a good reason.

My understanding is that the SEC is actively pulling forensic mirrors of all official communications, including exchange emails, Teams/Slack chats, and metadata. This has triggered absolute paranoia. Everyone is avoiding creating a paper trail, which is why—following the established toxic culture of this firm—all critical directives are now strictly delivered verbally to maintain plausible deniability.

The SEC is investigating systemic free cash flow manipulation and the internal mechanisms used to inflate it. Management knows that even a single written comment or internal whistleblowing leak could provide the SEC with the exact blueprint of how this financial fraud was manufactured.

Can such a company be trusted with the data of its own (US) citizens, set aside EU citizens?

"Another vote of confidence for this clown show of a company," somebody has just said sarcastically.

What seems like IBM insiders are meanwhile joking about the Anderon bailout for IBM:

The Anderon spinoff is just the continued IBM goal to pay for innovation (just like SW division) vs developing it themselves. Call it the al la cart strategy. Only divisions that use the innovation pay for it. You can pass thru the cost as you are a monopoly. IBM actually started down this path with GF and the spinoff of semiconductors. Yes it ended in disaster due to IBM’s poor contract terms. (100% spinoff with no control over GF future design promises. How did that work out when GF changed their minds and halted innovation development. IBM lost at least two years of competitive advantage when they had to go partner with Samsung

So what did IBM learn from the GF spinoff. Hold some equity in the spinoff so you have bargaining power over the spinoffs future. THUS IBM holding 50% of Anderon

More detailed below.

In many ways, this situation is a testament to the deeply entrenched leadership and management problems that have existed in Albany for years. The organization has a long history of making questionable and often illogical strategic and business decisions, while projecting an image and air of confidence and success that does not always align with the underlying reality.

To be fair, many of the leaders there were once highly capable engineers and researchers who achieved legitimate technical success earlier in their careers a decade or more ago. But technical competence and effective organizational leadership are not the same thing. Excelling in engineering decades ago does not automatically translate into an ability to make sound business decisions, build sustainable strategy, or manage complex institutions effectively.

There is also a tendency to heavily market certain initiatives as transformational successes without critically examining the actual outcomes. Take nanosheet technology as an example. Based on the way it is discussed publicly, one could easily come away with the impression that Albany originated, invented or pioneered the concept in 2010s. In reality, that is not the case (Hisamoto Tetsuya et al at Hitachi, Jean-Pierre Colinge, etc. in 90s and early 2000s). More importantly, the real measure of success is adoption and commercial impact. If no one is meaningfully licensing or purchasing the Albany implementation, can it genuinely be framed as a major victory? Reproducing and iterating on existing work is not the same thing as creating commercially successful innovation. Intel, Samsung and TSMC created their own without any assistance or licensing from IBM. So it is essentially a flop for the site.

The same dynamic applies to many of the JDAs and partnerships that the Albany site heavily relies upon financially and for revenue/income. These collaborations are often presented as evidence of strategic strength, yet a significant number either fail to produce meaningful long-term outcomes or eventually devolve into disputes, litigation, or fractured partnerships, as seen in situations involving GlobalFoundries and many others over the years.

Ultimately, the broader concern is not that Albany lacks talented people or technical capability. It is that the Albany leadership culture often appears far more skilled at managing perception and preserving internal power structures than at demonstrating measurable strategic success or accountability.

TLDR: Albany leadership doesn’t know what they are doing but are damn good at pretending they do.

That last line is applicable to all of IBM, even Red Hat.

"Albany leadership doesn’t know what they are doing but are damn good at pretending they do." █