Leaving aside all the bluster, was the Huawei situation the result of a national security crime by the CEO ?
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The behavior of this CEO is despicable….He has gutted the company and hollowed it out.
All good leaders have been taken out in the last one year, with the latest being the GC, leaving no one to challenge or threaten him. What a downfall in such a short time. $11B to $6,5B under this goon’s watch.
They likely made money even with the fine. I don’t see how the company can hold any employees accountable for most anything now. Earlier poster laid out a good case for utilizing factory and that is not a small thing in this case. And to do this with red China makes it even worse. Your CEO is worse than ours and that is a low bar indeed
I think it's clear that the BOD have no more power over how the company is run than the CEO. There are key shareholders pulling the strings in the background, sapping the engineering budget and protecting the dividend at the cost to vendors and employees.
While the CEO and CFO are squarely responsible for this criminal unpatriotic act, the board of this company is equally culpable for not taking the necessary strong action against these two criminal leaders.
Why would one stay on this board after this? Only because these individuals wouldn’t make it to the board of any company of real meaning.
What does it make these board members other than a bunch of lame, self absorbed, insecure people of poor quality and values?
Criminal CEO
Indeed, there were hidden paybacks from the sales that are not obvious to outsiders. Just being able to run factories at full capacity with allocation allows profit across the board, not just within one product. They may have given up the profit from sales to Huawei but they raked in millions from running factories more efficiently and reduced volume pricing from vendors.
I agree that the annual ethics training and policy acknowledgement rings hollow for employees while the top decisionmakers get to keep their jobs. Just a simple acknowledgement and apology from Mosley would go a long way but I doubt we will ever see it.
If you did the financial analysis you might come to the conclusion that the slap on the wrist was worth it. Certainly for some. Or, to put it another way, it's not at all clear whether the fine was really a deterrent for those who might be predisposed to repeat the violation. The only way to do that is hold individuals accountable.
Let's say an opportunity came along that violated a sanction, but enabled Company X to out-perform Company Y by Z% over some fiscal time period, boosting the value of Company X's stock. There are certainly some insiders who could assess the benefit to them, and if they knew they would not be held accountable or they could show plausible deniability, you could argue that nothing that has happened with Seagate and Huawei was a big enough deterrent to repeating the violation in the future. Ignore the fact that there are also ways to "launder" the sales to a sanctioned entity that weren't even apparently attempted here.
In this case, it looks like some mid-level VP in legal lost their job, but that's about it. And even that appears to be a voluntary act not one imposed by law. She was the scapegoat. The bottom line is until the people who really made this decision admit what they did was wrong and resign, I'm going to ignore all the lecturing we get on the important of ethics at Seagate.
Settled wihtout admitting
greed, caught, and fined sums it up
They violated a sanction and got caught and pretty much had to fork over all the profit from those sales. Are you fishing for something else?
Yes a crime was committed and they already paid the fine for the crime.