Racketeering Trial Starts & Ends Without Defendants
from the who-needs-'em? dept
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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Standard business in the developing world
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Standard business in the developing world
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
[ link to this | view in thread ]