Apple – another scandal. This time with its own employee
According to Wall Street Journal, at the end of last week, an Apple employee, one of USA’s largest IT companies, was arrested for fraud.
Paul Shin Devine, a global supply manager at Apple, was accused for 15 counts of fraud, money laundring and illicit money transactions, from which he allegedly received more than $1 million in kickbacks from six companies in Asia that serve as suppliers to the Silicon Valley company.
Paul Devine started working for Apple in June 2005, being responsible for maintaining and managing relations with Apple’s suppliers.
It appears that Paul Devine used his postion within the company to obtain secret information, that he afterwards sold to six Asian supply companies. Devine gave the suppliers of iPhone and iPod accessories confidential data that helped them win better contracts from Cupertino, California-based Apple in exchange for payments, according to the indictment. The suppliers included Cresyn, China’s Kaedar Electronics Co. and Singapore-based Jin Li Mould Manufacturing Pte., according to the civil complaint Apple filed against Devine on Friday, the 13th.
According to court papers, in order to fulfill this scheme, Devine used a chain of foreign and domestic bank accounts, along with one front company, to receive payments. Code words, such as “sample,” were used to refer to the payments to avoid raising the suspicions of other Apple employees, and he would also have bank transfers wired to his wife’s name, prosecutors said.
Apple claims that it investigated Devine since April 2010, and during the course of that investigation, discovered an “Entourage database and cache of e-mail from Devine’s personal Hotmail and Gmail e-mail accounts stored on Devine’s Apple-supplied laptop hard drive.”These e-mails also confirmed that Devine had demanded and received over a million dollars in illicit payments, kickbacks, bribes, and other things of value (which Devine sometimes refers to in e-mail correspondence as ‘samples’) from numerous suppliers, and had concealed his scheme from Apply over the course of several years.
Meanwhile, on his attorney appointment hearing on Monday, Paul Devine pleaded not guilty.11
