Transcript: Intel top execs failed to retain antitrust e-mails
The U.K's Inquirer and The Register are both reporting on a 58-page court filing (PDF) released this weekend that reveals Intel's top execs may have been playing "hide and seek the antitrust e-mails."
According to the document, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett, CEO Paul Otellini and sales chief Sean Maloney are on the list of employees believed to have deleted e-mails relevant to a lawsuit filed by Advanced Micro Devices.
As reported recently by CNET News.com, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel had already disclosed that it failed to preserve some documents related to AMD's 2005 antitrust lawsuit against it. The lawsuit alleges that Intel used the selective distribution of rebates to prevent certain customers from using AMD's chips.
According to our previous report, Intel had said human error allowed documents--mainly e-mails--to slip through the cracks of a manual document-retention system put in place after AMD sued the larger chipmaker. Intel had instructed employees to move their e-mails from a PC to a hard drive. The company later acknowledged that some employees failed to follow these procedures. What was unknown until now, however, was that Intel's top brass were likely a part of that group.
The transcript from a lawsuit status conference on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware records an AMD attorney referring to an Intel report that notes Otellini was "under the impression that IT was automatically backing up his e-mail and so he did not need to retain them."
The Register reports that Intel is now looking through employee e-mail files to find duplications of lost conversations and hopes to find a number of the missing memos when it reviews a large backup made last year.
