Microsoft Denies Paying Nigerians $400K To Ditch Linux

Da Massive writes "Microsoft has denied paying a Nigerian contractor $400,000 in a bid to retard Linux's movement into the government sector. Media reports alleged that Microsoft had proposed paying that sum to a government contractor under a joint marketing agreement last year, in order to persuade the contractor to replace Linux OS with Windows on thousands of school laptops. Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said a Microsoft regional manager for Africa. It became clear, he added, that one customer wanted a Linux OS."

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Hello Partner,

My name is Thomas Hansen and I am a regional manager for Microsoft West, a prominent software company that does business with the Government of Nigeria. In strictest confidence I am writing to you about the matter of a great magnitude of money.

Last year, my company was involved in negotiations with your government in the drawing up of a joint marketing agreement for business. During the last military regime of Nigeria, some government officials set up a fund and awarded themselves contracts for the purchase of software. The present civilian government has set up a contract review panel, and has identified ours as one that can be replaced with no cost to your government. Without further review, these contracts could amount to USD$40,000,000 (forty million U.S. dollars) or more.

I am authorized to offer you 1% of the value of these contracts, USD$400,000, in exchange for the erasure of the competing offer. Please note this transaction is 100% safe and legal. I will commence the transferring of the funds within 72 business hours upon receipt of your bank account number. Please fax your account and driver's license to 1-419-419-4190 to continue with this transaction.

I am looking forward to doing business with you and solicit your confidential reply to this transaction.

Faithfully yours,
Thomas Hansen

Re:REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) spam-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting Micorsoft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from sovereign nation to sovereign nation before a bad UN law was passed.)

(X) Nigerians can easily use it to harvest dollars
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop Microsoft for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from Spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Microsoft cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy Microsoft's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Nigerian reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of Microsoft
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Oops

I know self-replies are bad form. I also know that I wrote Microsoft some places where 'Linux' would've been more appropriate. Sorry for the confusion.

This post advocates a

(X) common sense ( ) spell-checker ( ) semantic verifier

-based approach to reading my above post.

Re:REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Obviously a fake. If it were a real Nigerian mail fraud letter, it would have more spelling errors and confusing punctuation.

Re:REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to see...

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Hello Partner,

DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!

Sincerely,

Steve Ballmer

Re:REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to see...

REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Hello Partner,

DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!

Snake! Snake!

What, why's everybody staring? Did I just fuck up another meme?

Re:REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

What, why's everybody staring? Did I just fuck up another meme?

It was on Slashdot this mroing. A poster in ar who had killed three memes. They are taking the articles back to CmdrTaco, too karma to post. My thoughts are with the submitter, who lost his atricle. I am truely sorry for your lots.

Of course they didn't pay the "partner" ...

As they do in other countries (see Eastern Europe for an example), Microsoft will just pay the government officials that award the contract.

It is a lot easier, safer (there are lawyer intermediaries, so it is impossible to catch the perpetrators) and works well, as the government has a "legitimate" reason to increase the budget, and the larger the budget, the merrier it gets.

Re:Of course they didn't pay the "partner" ...

Probably, but a prosecution is almost unpossible. First, the US is unlikely to investigate if there is no other interested party in the US to stink. Second, as I pointed out, evidence is hard to come by. The scheme roughly works like this

a) you meet someone, who isn't related in any "official way"
b) you two agree about the setup
c) a "public tender" is constructed by the government so that other participant are excluded
d) a chain of companies may be set up, usually offshore, so that it is harder to track where the money goes (and there is more than 1 jurisdiction involved)
e) if anything at all comes to light, the local employees are dumped. I'd probably guess they aren't prosecutable under the act you quote.

If MS really made an offer, probably the partner had very good connections to someone and was very "stubborn" on the linux thing. That, or the Nigerian M$ manager really roots for linux.

Dear Mr Ballmer

Dear Mr Ballmer
Good day and compliments. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dr. (Mrs.) Mariam Abacha. I can tell by the way jump about you are very intelligent man. In order secure the windows market in Africa you know what to do.
Your faithfully,
Dr (Mrs.) Mariam Abacha (M.O.N)

Re:Dear Mr Ballmer

I'm so glad I read this. I was about to make a redundant post.

So sorry to hear about the death of your husband . . . glad you have found a good revenue stream.

Corruption is normal in Nigeria

I had a Nigerian colleague once and he told me you get nothing done in Nigeria without paying the right people. So actually this is not news (and certainly not a story ;) :) ), but normal business practice.

Re:Corruption is normal in Nigeria

I haven't been to Nigeria but it sounds similar to a variety of other places. Once people are poor enough and the government is corrupt enough, bribery becomes acceptable and the whole thing is self-fuelling.

Jobs where bribes are likely become highly sought after. People won't get paid much in those positions because employers already know that they'll make up the rest from bribes, and people who bribe them accept it because they'd just as happily take a similar job and do the same thing if they could, since they can't do anything to change it.

I'm not 100% sure that avoiding doing business in highly corrupt countries is the complete way to go. In some ways it seems that influence from businesses used to less corrupt environments is what might finally change things. Exactly how much a company like Microsoft should play by Nigeria's rules is a difficult question -- it's also at their own risk, because if they're not careful, another corrupt official could come and screw them over or extract more and more money from them for a random reason at any time. As long as corruption continues to exist, though, it'll always be a gamble trying to promote something like Free Software in a country like Nigeria.

Re:Corruption is normal in Nigeria

My grandfather was an engineer for a number of years in Nigeria - and he would agree with you. Corruption exists within their normal economy.

My father was an engineer in the U.S. for decades, particularly within the military sector. Corruption exists within our normal economy as well, believe me. He told me a lot of stories about his years working as a military contractor: the corruption was all on the government's side.

Is vista really that bad?

...that they have to pay to get people to use it?

Re:Is vista really that bad?

It's probably XP, as school laptops are involved. They're not likely to be vista capable.

I detect an oxymoron in this sentence, I just can't put my finger on it though...

hohum

I was born in Nigeria and my dad worked there for many years. He will tell you that the Government then (1971) was corrupt and would sell their own mothers for a belly full of ruin (that is, a glass of whisky). We have seen nothing since then to change our minds.

The REAL reason microsoft decided not to pay...

Microsoft could have paid $400,000 and the Nigerians could have gone ahead and used linux anyway. Bribes only work when you trust people to stay bought.

Re:hmmm... interesting bribe?

the average per-year income in that country is just over $2k.

That's only if you average in the poor people.

I know someone personally who is teaching in Nigeria, most of the people around him are lucky to make $2k a year, while he makes around $43k.

The have's in that country have quite a bit of cash, but they are very few, and the have-not's are the vast majority of the population... and most of them have no income at all.

So while $400k would seem like enough to live like a king to the common person, it would put you at the bottom of the upper class for a year or less.

Re:hmmm... interesting bribe?

Actually, read between the lines:

Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. "As such, the joint marketing agreement became irrelevant; no such marketing agreement was ever agreed to, and no money was ever spent," he said.

You'll notice he doesn't deny attempting to pay 400k dollars to ditch Linux, he simply states that the plan to do so fell through.

Re:hmmm... interesting bribe?

The plan was done by Microsoft's vampire core. When it was exposed to the light of day (and media stories), the deal evaporated. The deal was actually exposed some number of months ago Microsoft doesn't like such deals being exposed. Deals like this being illegal doesn't help the situation.

Re:hmmm... interesting bribe?

Sorry, but I have to side with Bill on this -- it just doesn't pass the sniff test. $400k is enough money to live like a king or queen in those economic situations, and probably better than most government officials; the average per-year income in that country is just over $2k.

It is estimated that Former Nigerian President Sani Abacha ('93-'98-died in office) stole from the Nigerian government between $3 and $5 billion USD. The Nigerian government managed to negotiate for the return of $2.1 billion USD by agreeing to allow his family to keep the rest. The family later returned another $1.2 billion USD, which suggests that the amount stolen was closer to $5 billion.

The next guy was in office for a year.

After him was General Olusegun Obasanjo ('99-'07) whose estimated theft varies widely up to $20+ billion... but nobody is really. Obasanjo also got tangled up in a sex scandal when his eldest son claimed in divorce papers that his (the son's) wife slept with his father (the President) to secure government contracts for companies she was doing business with under a fake name. And this is the President who ran on an anti-corruption platform.

There are hopes that the current president will not be as corrupt as his predecessors, as he was one of the few governors in Nigerian politics with a clean record.

I tell you all this just to give you an idea of the scope of corruption in Nigeria.
$400K is pocket change compared to the money that changes hands in kleptocracies like Nigeria.

American and European companies budget for bribes. It's just how business is done.
In this case, Microsoft was going to stash the bribe under marketing costs.

Re:Holy Shit

They actually have modified See n' Say units, you pull the string and they spit out a new scam form letter ready to go. Its more of an instructional tool at this point:

"The NIGERIAN says......."

Re:Holy Shit

Nigerians have computers?

They have computers. I get email from them about once a week for assistance with some financial transaction or other. What they lack is good banks. The checks they send seem to always have problems. I now insist they send money using Western Union from now on.

Re:Realized they were being scammed?

$400K should be enough for everybody.