Sun Reveals It May Have Broken International Bribery Laws

Published: May 11, 2009
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
1 minute read
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Sun Microsystems admitted in its quarterly earnings report that it may have broken international anti-bribery laws in an incident that happened outside the United States.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based IT systems company did not specify where or when the illegal activity took place or who may have committed the infraction.
Although there is no indication at this time how serious the potential offense might be, it apparently is not enough to worry enterprise database maker Oracle, which announced April 20 that it intends to acquire Sun. Oracle said it knew about the report before it tendered its $7.4 billion offer to Sun’s board of directors.
In its first-quarter earnings report on April 28, Sun reported that it found “potential violations” of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, which prohibits publicly traded U.S. companies from bribing foreign government officials to get an inside track on obtaining new business.
The company did not reveal any other details of the incident in the first-quarter report, except that it “took remedial action” and alerted the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission as required by law.
If a violation is found, legal remediation can range from a fine to criminal charges to a potential block on working with federal government agencies-for decades a major source of Sun’s revenue.
The story first came to light in a report in the Wall Street Journal May 8. A Sun spokesperson had no comment.

Chris Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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