NEW YORK, Oct. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- LinkCo, Inc., an information technology company, is suing Fujitsu Ltd., a world leader in information technology, and its former chairman and CEO, Naoyuki Akikusa. The 4-count, 18-page Complaint, filed on Tuesday, October 14th in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 08 CV 8770 at http://linkcoinc.com/LinkCo-v-Fujitsu-Complaint-08_CV_8770.pdf)  accuses the global giant and its then president of fraud. Naoyuki Akikusa served as Fujitsu's president from 1998 to 2003 and CEO/chairman from 2003 to 2008 and is a Fujitsu director.

The Complaint alleges much more than digital fraud. However, the digital fraud is the most creative and innovative fraud yet seen on the Internet. (See Exhibit 15, reproduced at:  http://linkcoinc.com/HTI-updated-2008-04.doc)

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 practices were paper based. The transformation to digitally based disclosure systems was overwhelming.

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 $53 billion in sales. 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. What happened next -- the complete willful theft of LinkCo's intellectual property by Fujitsu and its subsidiary and affiliate companies -- would define the next several years of Israel-Rosen's life.

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 with his partner, Jim Cook, together discovered the compelling evidence behind this complaint. Specifically, even during the litigation, Fujitsu embarked on a program of shifting its sales to identical but newly named products in entities hidden from the court. Not until after the trial, was LinkCo able to discover massive 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. Despite these facts, Chairman Akikusa swore to the court that Fujitsu's disclosure offerings were limited to but one paltry product line, @DisclosureVision.

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. In order to sustain this fraud, Fujitsu engaged in the most innovative and nefarious hacking of information ever seen on the Internet.

LinkCo conducted an analysis of the HTML code on Fujitsu web pages. This analysis showed Fujitsu employed numerous creative devices to impede Internet discovery, such as displaying incriminating text in white when the background is white so it can't be read. They also buried specific incriminating text, such as dates and places, in cursor tags that are never translated (or searchable). A third, but common, device was putting incriminating text in images that also are never translated nor catalogued by search engines. These are explained in Exhibit 15, cited above.

LinkCo's new lawsuit also claims that Fujitsu fabricated the date of misappropriation to an earlier date so that its multibillion-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."

To view the full Complaint with all Exhibits, go to http://LinkCoInc.com

CONTACT: Judy Katz, +1-212-580-8833, judy@katzcreative.com