Racketeering Trial Starts & Ends Without Defendants

from the who-needs-'em? dept

Thu, Feb 20th 2003 2:07am — Mike Masnick

Motorola and Nokia started and ended a civil trial today against the Uzan family of Turkey, who they are charging with racketeering for "borrowing" nearly $3 billion they had no intention of paying back. The telecom firms lent this money to the family officially to start a wireless carrier in Turkey. Instead, the money was used on things like expensive real estate. Motorola is also claiming that people associated with the family hacked their equipment to say that it was defective - and therefore that they didn't have to repay the loan. At the trial today, however, no one from or representing the Uzan family bothered to show up. They claim that US courts have no jurisdiction over this. I guess if you've got $3 billion (or more) for free to play around with you can make those kinds of decisions. What I want to know is what makes companies like Nokia and Motorola just give out $3 billion to a random family that then goes and does this sort of thing? In fact, the lawsuit claims that the family has a history of doing other deals exactly like this one - including taking money from Motorola and Nokia's competitors Ericsson and Siemens.

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dorpus, 20 Feb 2003 @ 4:11am

Standard business in the developing world
Where does all that "development aid" go?

Looks like the private sector can be just as gullible and inefficient as government too.

Anti-globalization protestors could get their wish if they collaborate with people like the Uzan family to sabotage the global economy. Perhaps we should have workshops on how to dupe multinationals.

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- Anonymous Coward, 20 Feb 2003 @ 7:42am
  
  Re: Standard business in the developing world
  maybe the equipment simply didn t work, the joint venture didn t succed because motorola stopped investing in it and real estates were the company headquarters (and probably a better investment than the wireless netowrk)
  
  things can be more complex than, they are turks therefore wrong, we are americans and right.
  
  After all Motorola did not need a turk family to flush a few billions down the toilet, they could just sent a few more satellite into the sky and blame it on the martians for not paying the rent
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