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Fujitsu Sued for Fraud in US District Court by LinkCo, Inc. Small Technology Company Offers Evidence of Sanctioned Malfeasance |
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New York, NY (October 14, 2008) - LinkCo, Inc., an
information technology company, is suing Fujitsu Ltd., a world leader in
information technology, and its former CEO and representative director
Naoyuki Akikusa. The four count, 18-page Complaint, filed today in United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case 08 CV
8770), accuses the global giant and its former CEO of fraud. Naoyuki
Akikusa served as Fujitsu's CEO/Chairman from 1999 to 2008 and is still a
Board member. He also currently serves as Chairman of Japan Biological
Informatics, a consortium of 83 major Japanese companies. Representing LinkCo are: Peter Shapiro, Linda Unger and
Siobhan Murphy, partners in the prestigious 600-attorney law firm Lewis
Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP. In 1995, the Japanese government mandated a national program
they called the "Financial Big Bang." The government's intention
was to have completely digitized, consolidated, and unified financial disclosure
and reporting across Japan and also globally accessible via the Internet.
At the time Japan's highly complex disclosure systems were all on paper.
Given the hodge-podge of idiosyncratic data methods in use, the coordination
of such an undertaking was overwhelming and no one seemed able to economically
enable suitable digital disclosure systems David Israel-Rosen, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
trained innovation expert, saw the need and had a bold idea of how to make
this work. He took his idea for a new system to a friend, MIT research
scientist and lecturer Oded Maimon, an established authority on database
and information disclosure technology. Between them the partners devised
an ingenious and workable system by which Japanese companies could create
disclosure databases online in order to produce reports and support inquiries
and searches via the Internet, all in a remarkably effective, easy to use and
cost-effective way. They made this system the basis of a new company they
created and called LinkCo. Under LinkCo, they then filed and obtained a US
patent for their Corporate Disclosure and Repository System. They had solved
Japan's business reporting and disclosure challenge and met the challenge of
Japan's "Financial Big Bang." Israel-Rosen then set out to find a corporate client in Japan. The
logical collaborative partner, he believed, would be Fujitsu, a global IT
provider with 160,000 employees in 70 countries and sales of $53 billion.
Interest sparked, Fujitsu invited Israel-Rosen to discuss LinkCo's approach.
To make the case, Israel-Rosen brought a third LinkCo partner, Jim Cook, a
former MIT research engineer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
who had previously served as Vice President of Technology at Computervision
Corp., a Fortune 500 company. What happened next-the complete willful theft of his intellectual
property by Fujitsu and its subsidiary and affiliate companies-would define
the next several years of Israel-Rosen's life, in order to courageously fight
against all odds to expose Fujitsu's wrongdoing. "Clearly," Mr.
Israel-Rosen says, "Japan is a world leader in innovation, and has
demonstrated supremacy in mobile robotics, automotive manufacturing, hybrid
vehicles, and many other areas, and always, it seems, with the highest
quality. Our suit is about having a great company, Fujitsu, restore itself
to a state of integrity and desist in tarnishing Japan." LinkCo sued Fujitsu, and won in the United States District Court
for the Southern District of New York. On November 6, 2002, Fujitsu's
misappropriation of LinkCo's intellectual property was affirmed by unanimous
jury verdict: LinkCo, Inc. v. Fujitsu Ltd., No. 00 Civ 7242(SAS). As it turned out, however, justice had not been served. In the
years after this suit was settled, through tremendous effort, time and money,
Israel-Rosen and his partner, Jim Cook, discovered compelling evidence that,
when LinkCo initially sued Fujitsu in 1999, Fujitsu rapidly embarked on a
program of shifting its sales to identical but newly-named products and other
companies. LinkCo now has evidence that its proprietary and valuable
information has been used in multiple product lines by multiple subsidiaries,
affiliated companies, and even third parties, creating enormous profits for
Fujitsu. They also discovered that Chairman Akikusa had personally sanctioned
this effort and went on to lie in a sworn statement that Fujitsu's only effort
was @DisclosureVision-the intellectual property that was identical to LinkCo's
but with a Fujitsu name! LinkCo's Israel-Rosen eventually discovered that Fujitsu, its CEO,
its subsidiaries and affiliates engaged in an enormous cover-up of Fujitsu's
activities in order to deceive LinkCo and the Court as to the true nature and
extent of Fujitsu's misappropriation. The evidence he found showed that
Fujitsu, through control of witnesses, failure to disclose witnesses, and
tampering of evidence, committed a fraud on LinkCo and on a US District Court
in order to limit the extent of damages to be paid to LinkCo's. Fujitsu
did this by claiming it used the technology in only one product, which they
also maintained was marketed and sold only in Japan, and which they likewise
claimed was unsuccessful. LinkCo's new lawsuit also claims that Fujitsu fabricated the date
of misappropriation to an earlier date so that its multi-billion-dollar
projections of sales from products using LinkCo's trade secrets would never
be shown to the jury. As Ms. Unger, one of LinkCo's attorneys, explains:
"In the previous trial, a PriceWaterhouseCooper's Damages expert, Aaron
Levko, testifying for LinkCo, estimated that Fujitsu's damages due LinkCo were
in excess of $550 million dollars. However, because of the date Fujitsu
attributed to the initial misappropriation, the Court did not allow Mr.
Levko to testify as to the full extent of LinkCo damages. Now we can show
how, as LinkCo alleges in its complaint, Fujitsu's deception of two months
allowed Fujitsu to potentially escape a half billion dollars or more of
damages." "Additionally," she continues, "Fujitsu hid its
international activities, a move that could amount to an additional $300
million in damages. Factoring in interest since the misappropriation, the
total, not including punitive damages, is in excess of $1.5 billion." * * * Media contact: Judy Katz, 212-580-8833,
judy@katzcreative.com |
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