Defendants Acquitted at AOL Trial
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Press Release from: ANCOSO Development GmbH
Two former midlevel executives at America Online were acquitted Tuesday on all counts of charges that they conspired with a now-defunct Las Vegas software firm to inflate its revenue with secret side deals and backdated contracts.
A third defendant, a senior executive at the Las Vegas company, also was found not guilty on all counts.
The verdicts brought to a close one of the longest trials in the history of the federal courthouse in Alexandria. The trial lasted more than three months, but the jury took only two full days of deliberations to reach its verdict.
All three defendants wept with relief when the verdicts were read.
John Tuli, a former vice president in AOL's NetBusiness unit; Kent Wakeford, a former executive director at AOL's business affairs unit; and Christopher Benyo, a former senior vice president of marketing at PurchasePro, had been accused of deceiving PurchasePro stockholders about the company's revenue in the first quarter of 2001 as the dot-com economy collapsed.
The alleged ringleader of the scheme, PurchasePro founder Charles "Junior" Johnson, is scheduled to go on trial in August.
Several PurchasePro executives had struck plea deals and testified at the trial.
AOL is the online access unit of Time Warner Inc.
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New!
July 13 2006
This site and blog are not necessarily against AOL. It's a critique of some of the methods AOL uses or some may say abuses toward it's customers and/or the internet at large.
Visiting Dear AOL, for example, will reveal a petition that some are signing in order to stop AOL from sending allowed spam to your AOL email-box.
Are you being threatened with trademark infringement? Have you been ordered to transfer your domain name over? Here are some resources:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
About This Blog
This blog was formed after AOL™ or America Online ™ - an online service provider - sent a threatening notice to the Registrar of the domain name www.aol-icq.net telling them to transfer it to AOL. The notice made assertions of copyright infringement of the name and even went so far as to assert their ownership of the once non-AOL controlled name ICQ™. At first blush, this may seem not so unreasonable. However. The former owner of www.aol-icq.com, acquired circa 1998 for the purpose of helping AOL members use ICQ while on AOL, is the same owner of www.aol-icq.net, which was acquired in 2002 when an accidental missing of the deadline left it open for AOL to register it.
Therefore, does this latest AOL threat sound like Reverse Domain Name Hijacking?
