Infineon Execs Plead Guilty
Arik Hesseldahl, 12.02.04, 6:30 PM ET
NEW YORK - With four of its executives pleading guilty to price-fixing charges today, Infineon will have a hard time arguing that it didn't fix prices in its ongoing litigation with Rambus.
The two companies have been fighting a protracted legal war over royalties and patents for four years before a U.S. federal court in Richmond, Va. Rambus initially lost in 2003, but later won before an appeals court decision which ordered the two companies back to the lower court to re-argue their cases under a different set of legal assumptions generally thought to be more favorable to Rambus. The retrial is expected to get underway next year.
In today's legal moves, the Infineon executives agreed to serve up to six months in prison and pay $250,000 in fines. According to papers filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the execs, Heinrich Florian, Gunter Hefner, Peter Schaefer and T. Rudd Corwin admitted they were involved in a conspiracy during 2001 and 2002 to fix the prices of computer memory chips known as Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). Corwin, is a U.S. citizen, the other three are German nationals. Infineon spokesman Christophe Liedtke said that two of the employees have left the company, while the other two have been reassigned to other divisions.
The pleas are the latest moves in an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that has swept several companies including Infineon, Micron Technologies and South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor in its wake.
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