AOL fraud case ’settled’
p2pnet.net News:- Time Warner executives must be wishing they’d never heard of America Online.
“The Justice Department will file a criminal complaint that accuses AOL and PurchasePro.com, a thriving software company that has since shut down, of engaging in a scheme to inflate revenue in federal court in Virginia,” Reuters quotes an unnamed Justice Department official as saying.
Time Warner’s ownership of the purveyor of the detested AOL CD is to cost it more than half a billion dollars.
It’ll pay $210 million to settle charges that AOL inflated revenue, and it’s, “also expected to pay about $300 million more to settle charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission related to its buyout of a stake held by Germany’s Bertelsmann in AOL Europe, a source familiar with the matter said,” states Reuters.
The DoJ official said AOL had agreed to cooperate with the investigation and implement new internal controls to avoid prosecution, but will defer prosecution for two years,” says the story.
You or I would have ended up doing instant hard time if we’d been caught doing something similar.
“Analysts have said that Time Warner could be shielded from shareholder lawsuits if the company doesn’t have to admit to wrongdoing,” adds Reuters.
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See:-
criminal - TimeWarner Settles AOL Fraud for $210 Mln, Reuters, December 15, 2004
