Execs go to jail, do not pass go in Samsung DRAM price fixing case
In what might signal the end of the US federal investigation into DRAM price fixing between April 1999 to June 2002, three Samsung execs -- Sun Woo Lee, Yeongho Kang, and Young Woo Lee -- have pled guilty to charges this morning and agreed to pay fines of $250,000 apiece in addition to serving seven-to-eight months in a US luxury prison. Execs from co-conspirators Hynix Semi, Elpida Memory, Micron Technology, and Infineon Technology had previously plead quilty and agreed to serve time as well. Micron is believed to have been the company that tipped off the feds to the scheme and thus has not been charged as a company. With this now behind them, Samsung can focus on defending, or coming-clean, to charges brought against them by the South Korean FTC of "unfair trading practices" with regard to their NAND flash memory modules. For as they say, relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
