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U.S. Said to Look Into Microsoft Bribery Allegations

March 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The United States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have both opened preliminary investigations into the bribery allegations involving Microsoft in China, Italy and Romania, according to the person, who declined to be named because the software company considers the inquiry a confidential legal matter.

Microsoft’s practices in those countries are being looked at for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law that prohibits American companies from making illegal payments to government officials and others overseas to further their business interests.

In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, John Frank, vice president and deputy general counsel of Microsoft, said the company could not comment about continuing inquiries. Mr. Frank said it was not uncommon for such government reviews to find that allegations were without merit.

“We take all allegations brought to our attention seriously and we cooperate fully in any government inquiries,” Mr. Frank said in the blog post. “Like other large companies with operations around the world we sometimes receive allegations about potential misconduct by employees or business partners and we investigate them fully regardless of the source. We also invest heavily in proactive training, monitoring and audits to ensure our business operations around the world meet the highest legal and ethical standards.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the investigations on its Web site on Tuesday.

Michael Passman, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the department had a policy of not confirming or denying the existence of investigations. A spokesman for the S.E.C. could not be reached immediately for comment.

The allegations in China were first shared with United States officials last year by an unnamed whistle-blower, who had worked with Microsoft in the country, according to the person briefed on the inquiry. The whistle-blower said that a Microsoft official in China directed the whistle-blower to pay bribes to government officials to win business deals, this person said. After this incident, the whistle-blower had a business conflict with Microsoft, the person added.

In 2010, Microsoft itself conducted an internal investigation of the allegations, with the help of an outside law firm, that found no evidence of improper behavior, this person said.

The federal agencies are also looking at Microsoft’s relationship with outsiders in Romania and Italy, including software resellers and consultants, who are said to have bribed government officials to secure contracts for government business, this person said.

Edward Wyatt contributed reporting from Washington and Ben Protess from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/technology/us-said-to-look-into-microsoft-bribery-allegations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous.

February 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Once he arrived in Baku, Ibrahimov went straight to his architects and said, “Draw this exactly the way I did.” Avesta Concern, the company that governs his various business interests, subsequently commissioned the blueprints for Ibrahimov’s vision. The result will be a sprawling, lobster-shaped development called Khazar Islands — an archipelago of 55 artificial islands in the Caspian Sea with thousands of apartments, at least eight hotels, a Formula One racetrack, a yacht club, an airport and the tallest building on earth, Azerbaijan Tower, which will rise 3,445 feet.

When the whole project is complete, according to Avesta, 800,000 people will live at Khazar Islands, and there will be hotel rooms for another 200,000, totaling nearly half the population of Baku. It will cost about $100 billion, which is more than the gross domestic product of most countries, including Azerbaijan. “It will cost $3 billion just to build Azerbaijan Tower,” Ibrahimov said. “Some people may object. I don’t care. I will build it alone. I work with my feelings.”

It’s not surprising that Ibrahimov, who plans to live in the penthouse of Azerbaijan Tower, had his epiphany on a flight from Dubai. The vision behind Khazar Islands, after all, is not a vision so much as a simulacrum of a vision. The fake islands, the thousands of palm trees and the glass and steel towers — many of which resemble Dubai’s sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel — are all emblems of the modern Persian Gulf petro-dictatorship. And two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union — its final custodian during 23 centuries of near-constant occupation — Azerbaijan could be accused of having similar ambitions. The country, which is about the size of South Carolina, has 9.2 million people and is cut off from any oceans. It builds nothing that the rest of the world wants and has no internationally recognized universities. It does, however, have oil.

In 2006, Azerbaijan started pumping crude from its oil field under the Caspian Sea through the new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Now, with the help of BP and other foreign energy companies, one million barrels of oil course through the pipeline daily, ending at a Turkish port on the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. This makes Azerbaijan a legitimate energy power (the world’s leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia, produces 11 million barrels every day) with a great deal of potential. If the proposed Nabucco pipeline, running from Turkey to Austria, is built, Azerbaijan would become a conduit for gas reserves, linking Central Asia to Europe. This could strip Russia, which sells the European Union more than a third of the gas it consumes, of one of its most potent foreign-policy levers. It could also generate billions of dollars every year for Azerbaijan, which between 2006 and 2008 had the world’s fastest-growing economy, at an average pace of 28 percent annually.

Sitting on a couch in the temporary headquarters at the construction site of his future city, Ibrahimov mulled the possibilities. The headquarters, which looks like a very modern log cabin, features a big conference table, flat-screen televisions, a bar, pretty assistants and a dining table that is always set. There is a gargantuan portrait of the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, hanging from a wall, next to the bar. Spread out on the conference table were blueprints for Khazar Islands, which looked like battle plans. Men in leather jackets picked from crystal bowls filled with nuts and dried fruit and caramels in shiny wrappers.

Ibrahimov had slept five hours, he said, but was not tired. He started the day with an hourlong run, followed by a dip in the Caspian Sea, followed by a burst of phone calls over breakfast, followed by meetings with some people from the foreign ministry, then the Turks, then his engineers and architects. Now, while sipping tea, Ibrahimov’s attention was back on Khazar Islands, which he insisted was not modeled after Dubai. “Dubai is a desert,” he said. “The Arabs built an illusion of a country. The Palm” — a faux-island development in Dubai — “is not right. The water smells. Also, they built very deep in the sea. That’s dangerous. The Palm is beautiful to look at, but it’s not good to live in.”

Peter Savodnik is the author of “The Interloper,” a book about Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union, to be published in October.

Editor: Jon Kelly

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/azerbaijan-is-rich-now-it-wants-to-be-famous.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Advertising: A Direct Approach to Disaster Relief From Procter & Gamble

June 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Days after the tornado, two of the company’s brands, Tide and Duracell, arrived with their own specially equipped trailers and crews, which set up in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Joplin.

One trailer housed the Tide Loads of Hope mobile laundry, first dispatched to post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005, which provided free wash-and-fold service. The other was the Duracell Power Relief Trailer, which provided free batteries and flashlights as well as charging stations for phones and laptops.

In an era when 87 percent of Americans believe that companies should place at least as much value on societal interests as on business interests, according to a study by Edelman, the public relations firm, the line between marketing and philanthropy has grown increasingly fuzzy.

The widely lauded Pepsi Refresh Project, for example, which awarded more than $20 million to about 1,000 projects in 2010, was introduced after the beverage maker announced that it would forgo buying commercial time during the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years and allocate funds to causes instead.

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Marketers run both the Tide and Duracell programs, but while the trailers are festooned with logos, there is no overt selling.

“I guess you could call it a marketing expense because it’s run by our marketing team,” said Mandy Treeby, the external relations manager for Tide who leads the Loads of Hope program. “But Tide has cleaned clothes for Americans every day for the last 65 years, and this is so core to our purpose as a brand.”

On May 26, the mobile laundry, which generally handles roughly 300 loads a day, extended its hours and accepted 764 loads, its busiest day ever.

Dispatches from Joplin on the Tide Facebook page, with almost 1.4 million followers, have drawn hundreds of glowing comments from users.

“This is exactly why I don’t mind paying a little more for a product like Tide,” Samantha Cantrill wrote in a typical comment on May 27. “I love that you guys turn around and give back to people.”

Kurt Iverson, a spokesman for Duracell, said helping consumers in the aftermath of a storm is a natural fit for the brand.

“Spring and summer season is a preparedness time when we try to remind consumers they need to have batteries ready because storms can take your power away from you,” Mr. Iverson said.

The Duracell trailer made its first disaster outing in May after the tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala. In the 13 days that the trailer was in Tuscaloosa, it was visited by about 3,000 families and distributed about 3,200 flashlights and batteries. About half of the visitors charged laptops or used onboard computers, often to get online to update friends and family.

“It’s just a great opportunity to really have some personal relationships with consumers that have probably bought Duracell for years but probably didn’t expect them to show up on their doorstep when they needed them most,” Mr. Iverson said.

Tide spent $177.2 million on advertising in 2010 and Duracell spent $60.4 million, according the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

The Gigunda Group, a firm based in Manchester, N.H., that specializes in experiential marketing, a term for in-person activities and events, coordinates the logistics for both the Tide and Duracell efforts.

Ross Mosher, the director of production for Gigunda , has traversed the country with the Tide unit for more than four years and said that because both water and sewer lines are often damaged, about 60 percent of the time the team has to bring in fresh water and take out dirty water.

Sometimes, Tide forgoes its truck and leases local laundries, providing free wash-and-fold services there.

“It may be that all they have is the clothes that they pulled out of the debris of their house, and when it’s a flood, sometimes the clothes are soaking wet and dirty,” Mr. Mosher said.

Laundry at Loads of Hope, which is staffed by about 10 Gigunda and Procter Gamble employees as well as workers hired locally, is washed, folded, wrapped in paper, placed in bags and tied with a ribbon.

“People come and lean over the table and give us a hug,” Mr. Mosher said. “One of the things that every brand strives for is to have an emotional connection to their brand, and Loads of Hope provides that every time.”

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Since 2006, Gigunda also has coordinated the mobile public restrooms that Charmin, another P. G. brand, has provided in Times Square during the holiday season, and Mr. Mosher said restrooms might soon be dispatched to disaster areas, too.

With pets distressed by disasters, too, Gigunda also is discussing with Procter the possibility of outfitting a pet-assistance mobile unit, which could be linked to the company’s Iams and Eukanuba brands, according to Mr. Mosher.

“You have to be incredibly careful around natural disasters because you don’t want to be seen as an ambulance chaser, and you cannot merchandise on the back of a disaster,” said Carol Cone, managing director for brand and corporate citizenship at Edelman.

But Tide has steered clear of pitfalls, Ms. Cone said.

“What they came up with is to give superhuman powers to their brand to help out during disasters,” Ms. Cone said. “In a disaster people have lost everything, but what Tide realized is that just bringing in a laundromat gives people a modicum of normalcy, a moment of humanity.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=782c61f1525bfbd067dcd232d4cb049f

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