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Former CA Boss Gets 12 Years, $8M Fine 150

Posted by CowboyNeal from the off-to-the-big-house dept.
mwnyc writes "The BBC is reporting on the sentence issued today to former CA boss Sanjay Kumar, who had pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and securities fraud. Mr. Kumar is expected to begin serving time in February 2007. Under federal sentencing guidelines, Kumar could have faced life in prison but the judge called that punishment 'unreasonable.'"
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Former CA Boss Gets 12 Years, $8M Fine More

Former CA Boss Gets 12 Years, $8M Fine

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  • Heh, I knew it! (Score:4, Informative)

    by itwerx ( 165526 ) on Friday November 03, 2006 @12:21AM (#16699489) Homepage
    Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...
    • Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...
      The only one of their products that I ever used was SuperProject, which actually was very good and made MS-Project look like a toy in comparison. Of course CA dropped this product years ago.
      • SuperProject is gone, but CA recently acquired Niku, which has possibly the single best project/portfolio management tool available - Clarity.
        • We use Niku in our organisation. It's web based and is easy to use. But power-wise it still lacks SuperProject.
        • You can rest assured that CA will fire all of the developers, milk Niku for every penny its worth, and then scrap it just like every other piece of technology they acquire.

          CA is a sales organization, plain and simple. Acquire, fire, sell, sell, sell, drop. They couldn't develop a coat rack if their lives depended on it.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 10scjed ( 695280 )
        CA had very few of its own projects, they just bought everyone else up. Only problem was they would axe everyone who UNDERSTOOD the damn products and they would inevitably fall to shit. Then there was CA Licensing, on the mainframe (CA90s) it wasnt so bad, but on the client/server side it was absurd.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by LVWolfman ( 301977 )

      Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...

      I've only used one CA product that I know of, CA Realizer. Realizer was a BASIC IDE/Compiler for Win16 and OS/2 that in my opinion blew the doors off of MS Visual Basic for Windows.

      Part of this was probably due to the fact that I'm an old school BASIC programmer (TRS-80 Model I Level II, Commodore 64/128, AmigaBASIC, GWBasic, QuickBasic, MS Professional Development System 7, etc.) About the

      • Ya, I remember looking at it under OS/2. I liked it...we just didn't have a need for it based on our product line. And I agree...it shamed MS' offering.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cr0sh ( 43134 )
        From one longtime BASIC programmer to another, I salute you for your support of the language...

        With that said - I am curious how you deal/cope with people who verbally attack, etc - BASIC programmers and users, the language and such? For myself, I defend when needed, and ignore when absurd.

        I personally love BASIC, and in my career I can't seem to leave it (currently I work for a company doing old-school ASP work, for example). At home, I have mainly moved on the Perl, PHP, and Python. While I know C/C++, I

    • Oh absolutly. If you used a system and it was brought by CA you knew that within 6 months you were going to be (a) screwed by a price increase and (b) screwed because there would be no support or new development beyond rushing out what was already in the pipeline.

      In the late 1980's I worked for a UK Blue Chip company that had a semi-official 'No CA' policy. Indeed when CA took over Clipper (a dBase III clone) which they used for most desktop development at that point they immediatly decided that there wou
      • Similar here. I remember using IngresWindows4GL back in 1994 - it was second (in the UK at least) to Oracle. The big four were, Oracle, Ingres, Sybase and Informix. The job market for Ingres pros was on fire but then the company which owned Ingres ran into trouble and sold the product to CA. Within a year, everyone was trying to jump ship or had already jumped and there were hardly any Ingres jobs being advertised.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Nefarious Wheel ( 628136 )
        CA are the trash bond merchants of the IT world. Buy, strip, dump.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...

      A very good marketing team who knows that targeting managers and executives is far more important than targeting techs.
      • CA never bothered much with marketing as they were hated by said same executives!

        They just but up smaller but undercapitalised companies with a locked in user base
        and made thier products profitable by hiking up the license fees and dropping all
        product development.

        This was a paticular headache in the ye olde worlde mainframe worlde.
        There was this nice little security product called TopSecret which was aquired by
        CA. After a year or two of price hikes and no support the client site I was working
        at decided to s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      People often misunderstand what CA does.

      They provide maintenance services for dead product lines that have existing service and support contracts for their production systems. When the product line is killed, the existing contracts still have to be honoured. CA buys those service contracts as a product-line bundle.

      It's not a glamorous business, and of course the products in question don't get new features and major enhancements. They're already on life-cycle support.

      • It's not a glamorous business, and of course the products in question don't get new features and major enhancements. They're already on life-cycle support.

        They also don't get working bug fixes or useful product support.

        By the time a product gets to CA, it's not on life-cycle support. It's already dead, it's just running around like the proverbial decapitated poultry.

  • Okay, I'm not really seeing the story. Criminal breaks law. Criminal gets caught. Criminal gets sent to jail. News at 11?

    Seriously, what's so interesting about this story? Was it a famous company? Sure he got a lot of money in fraud, but is that in and of itself really that interesting?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Clearly he should be sent to jail, but 12 years sounds like a lot of time, even if gets shortened for parole. This man cheated to make the quarterly numbers and lied to cover it up, but it doesn't sound like a totally corrupt, pulling the wool over investor's eyes like what occurred at Enron for instance.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Kumar got such a long sentence because the wrong people got screwed.

        In all likelihood, there were some very influential people that were aware of their shenanigans, but got blindsided by the downfall.

        These people expect prior notice so they can quietly withdraw their funds and leave the little guy to get the shaft. The game is carefully orchestrated and - if you don't play by the rules - you get 12 years in the pokey.

        The uber rich do not lose money on theirinvestments. If they do, heads roll!
    • Justice might be blind, but it can recognize a banknote by touch, apparently... that's the news, I guess.

      "life in prison would have been to harsh, let's give him 12 years instead".
      Whoa, that kind of thing would have never happened to, say a petty thief that stole some food to feed his family (instead of, I don't know, robbing somebody at knife-point or worse), now would it ?
      • 4e 65 78 74 20 74 69 6d 65 20 49 20 77 6f 6e 27 74 20 62 6f 74 68 65 72 20 64 65 63 72 79 70 74 69 6e 67 20 79 6f 75 72 20 68 65 78 2e
    • Yes, it was a famous company. For a long time, it was the second biggest software company by revenue, after Microsoft. Many people in the computer industry in the U.S. have had dealings with them, one way or another. They were also famous for bad practices: terrible employee relations, annual reorganizations for no good reason, stuffing the sales channel, lying to Wall Street, acquiring companies and then running them and their products into the ground, the list goes on. I suspect many people are person

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by spookymonster ( 238226 )
        In 1995, Computer Associates (now known as CA) bought up nearly every third party MVS (IBM's mainframe OS) application. In the industry, it was seen as the death knell of the mainframe; it reduced the choice of software vendors down to 2 monolithic companies. On the one side, you had IBM with their over-complicated software (a study once found that the average IBM manual read at the post-grad level) selling at loss-leader prices. On the other side, you had CA buying up their competitors, then announcing tho
  • Pretty please?

    With gigs of flash on top??

  • I guess... (Score:4, Funny)

    by fohat ( 168135 ) on Friday November 03, 2006 @12:30AM (#16699557) Homepage
    He's not going to make it to the White Castle after all...
  • CA boss? California? Organized crime? What? When 'CA' means C.A., something's wrong.
    • Computer Associates rebranded to simply 'CA' about a year ago. Since everyone was referring to them as C.A. anyway, they decided not to fight it. Also to subtly distance themselves from the subject of TFA.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 10scjed ( 695280 )
      They are just CA now, not C.A. - Computer Associates, just CA.

  • CA = Computer Associates (Score:4, Informative)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) on Friday November 03, 2006 @12:38AM (#16699595)
    CA = Computer Associates for those who are WTFing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )
      Or Competitor Acquisitions, since that's what they did.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by British ( 51765 )
      WTF = What the fuck, for those who didn't get the OTHER acronym.
      (we could play this game all day on Slashdot)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AusIV ( 950840 )
        Fuck = For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. (According to some)

        Have I left anything to continue the chain?

        • I've also heard Fuck = Fornication Under Consent of the King, which is pretty much the opposite of the Van Halen version. I have no idea which is true (if either), and this is completely off-topic, but WTH :-)
          • Neither one is true, Fuck has been in the English language for centuries. "[Origin: 1495-1505; akin to MD fokken to thrust, copulate with, Sw dial. focka to copulate with, strike, push, fock penis]" (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fuck [reference.com]) It is not an acronym. Read your way down to the bottom of the link for the first known use of the word in print.
    • While we are on this topic. WTF is AFAIK? I've seen it used a few times but simply ignored it.
      • AFAIK = As Far As I Know, FWIW, HTH.

        Steal a thousand dollars, it's your problem.
        Steal a million dollars and it's the bank's problem.

        With massive financial crime, the victims are usually so faceless that even judges have trouble seeing the pain it causes. When you defraud just one grandmother out of her life savings, they have no such problems, although it's basically the same thing.
  • Here's an analogy to express my feelings on this: I'm drinking in a bar. Outside, people are walking the streets, beers in hand. I walk outside and the cops bust me for breaking the city's open container law, while hundreds of people mill around me with drinks. A little selective enforcement. Did I do something wrong?

    We have an overwhelming culture of corruption in this country, at the pinnacle of which are the directors and executives of major corporations. We let these guys get away with anything.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      Maybe the cops busted you for whatever it is you're drinking. ;)
    • Wait, does that mean that if you fill a baby bottle with heavy liquor and suck on it on the street it's ok with the cops ? :)
    • If Kumar was white? Jeez, the boss of Enron was non-white? The boss of Tyco was non-white? Martha Stewart is non-white? Comeon, you should be able to rouse a better argument than the race card.

    • If Kumar was white, he would've walked. Instead, he gets thrown under the bus.

      WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers isn't white? Ken Lay (Take off your tin foil hat, he's dead.) et al are not white? Former Tyoc CFO Mark Swartz isn't white? He's doing 8 and a half. Going way, way back, Robert Vesco is sort of white-ish. Terrence D. Chalk of CEO of Compulinx (see the Slashdot story yesterday) is white... Read the papers, and listen to the evening news, lot's of white guys are going to jail.

      Ken Lay's family is drinking ch

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The whole thing disgusts me. Ken Lay's family is drinking champagne and eating caviar, probably with Ken himself (anyone who believes he's really dead is an idiot),...
      I want you to read the sentance you just wrote again, then think again about Mr Lay's unfortunate death.

      Qui Bono?
    • If Kumar was white, he would've walked.
      I'm guessing this is why the parent was modded as flamebait, as it goes against the current slashdot groupthink that there is no longer any such thing as racism in the US, except of course for non-whites towards whites...

      • I'm guessing this is why the parent was modded as flamebait, as it goes against the current slashdot groupthink that there is no longer any such thing as racism in the US, except of course for non-whites towards whites...

        It's modded as flamebait because this is the only nonwhite CEO that's been busted for majorly bullshit activities like this in a long time. Read around this thread, you can see numerous examples of people being busted for the same kind of stuff and they're all white.

        If it had been sa

  • Just a minor comment on the article wording. Kumar did, in fact, "[face] life in prison." He just didn't receive it. As a writer, I'm dismayed by this error. I know what you meant, but the article is technically inaccurate.

    Feel free to mod this into oblivion. ;^)

    --
    Toro
  • ...putting a worthless sack of shit in prison for the rest of his life, where he can't continue to fuck people over is a bad thing...

    Although letting some of his former employees get 20 unsupervised minutes alone with him would serve the same purpose... even better, when they're done with him, we wouldn't have to spend tax dollars to feed him.
  • I shouldn't have to click through a link to find out what an acronym means, especially because it's the only acronym used in the writeup. For the love of god, just because this is a nerd website does not automatically mean that everyone already knows that CA apparently stands for "Computer Associates".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by seifried ( 12921 )
      They have TV commercials, print ads, etc. Not completely unreasonable to except a tech related web site might assume people know who "IBM" or "MS" or "CA" is. Personally I would have spelled the entire name unless space was an issue (rarely on a website).
      • IBM and CA aren't even in the same league. As for MS, I'm assuming that means Microsoft, but that's a rather uncommon abbreviation ... generally Microsoft just isn't abbreviated, or if it is, they use the stock ticker, which is MSFT.
      • I guess I'm in the minority then because I've been on this site for a looong itme and CA is the first acronym that I had no idea what it meant. Kept thinking "wtf is with a California boss". :(

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by jjp5421 ( 659783 )
      CA is the name of this software company. It was known as Computer Associates, Intl. about a year ago.
  • In Canada... a rapist gets 6 years and gets out after 3... In the US... you fraud... you get 12 years ... and you do 12 years... Don't fraud in the US!

  • Breaking: Transcript of CA Exec phone call Nov 1st (Score:3, Funny)

    by ShaunC ( 203807 ) * on Friday November 03, 2006 @01:44AM (#16699921)
    Kumar's phone. Kumar speaking.

    Hey, what's up? It's me. What are you doing?

    Nothing important. I can talk. What's going on?

    Listen, I can't party tonight, okay? I gotta stay late at the prosecutor's office.

    Dude, fuck that shit. We had plans.

    I know, but I got a lot of work to do drawing up your sentence for securities fraud.

    When has getting high ever prevented you from doing your work?

    Jesus!

    I got a quarter of the finest herb in New York City. I'm not smoking that shit alone, okay? So you need to just chill the fuck out and prepare to get blazed, because in the next couple of hours, I expect both of us to be blitzed out of our skulls, got it?

    All right, I got it.

    I'll talk to you later, some guy with handcuffs is at the door.

  • Cow-mercialism (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    American Corporation: You have two cows. You sell one to a subsidiary company and lease it back to yourself so you can declare it as a tax loss. Your bosses give you a huge bonus. You inject the cows with drugs and they produce four times the normal amount of milk. Your bosses give you a huge bonus. When the drugs cause one of the cows to drop dead you announce to the press that you have down-sized, reducing expenses by 50 percent. The company stock goes up and your bosses give you a huge bonus. You lay off
  • CA is still a crappy consulting headshop to work for, and they still mooch a lot of business for supporting mainframe tools for shops who are still using z/OS on their mainframes and haven't completely converted over to Linux on their s/390 hardware yet.
  • Worst backup solution ever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lxy ( 80823 )
      Arcserve was a nice piece of software. I think you're referring to BRIGHTSTOR, the bleeding pile of crap that used to be known as Arcserve.
  • with this sort of deal they get told to turn up for prison in a few months time. Anyone else gets found guilty and slammed away. Executive crime OTOH seems to involve giving them plenty of time to get their affairs in order or simply disappear, as desired. TBH, If I was a very rich dude and had been given 8 years in jail, I'd be tempted to disappear.
    • Actually, it usually takes several weeks for the Federal Prison System to figure out where to place inmates. When people are immediately placed behind bars after sentencing, they are usually placed in a temporary prison until the system identifies where they will be placed permanently. I guess with "non violent" criminals, they allow them to wait at home instead of in a temporary prison.

  • >Mr. Kumar is expected to begin serving time in February 2007

    Its more sporting to give him four months to get to the mexico and then a plane to India. He is white-collar after all...
  • "the judge called that punishment [life in prison] 'unreasonable.'"

    Clearly the judge has never installed ARCserve...
  • because that was the heart of Sanjay's scam.

    and don't start the clock until a 35-day month is reached ;)

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