Posted on Monday, July 26 2010 @ 20:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report
writes Dell has agreed to pay a $100 million fine to the SEC to settle an accounting fraud case, which centered around the way Dell hid the effect of massive payments from Intel to use the chip giant's processors.
Looks like last month's rumors were true. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Dell was indeed able to pay a fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission without admitting guilt or ousting its CEO. Dell is now $100 million poorer, and Michael Dell himself $4 million poorer, but we may never know for sure if the SEC's laundry list of allegations holds any water.
And we are talking about a rather long laundry list. In a nutshell, the Journal says Dell was accused of failing to disclose huge payments from Intel—payments without which Dell "would have missed Wall Street analysts' profit estimates in every fiscal quarter from 2002 to 2006." The Intel cash reportedly made up over three quarters of Dell's operating income ($720 million) for one quarter in 2006... and the SEC has e-mails of Dell execs discussing "the need for larger payments . . . to hit financial goals"
