Fujitsu and Former CEO Naoyuki Akikusa Sued for Digital Fraud in US District Court by
LinkCo, a Small Technology Company
NEW YORK, Oct. 21 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --
LinkCo, Inc., an information technology company, is suing Fujitsu Ltd., a world leader in
information technology, and its former chairman and CEO, Naoyuki Akikusa. The 4-count, 18-page
Complaint, filed on Tuesday, October 14th in United States District Court for the Southern District
08_CV_8770.pdf) accuses the global giant and its then president of fraud. Naoyuki Akikusa served
as Fujitsu's president from 1998 to 2003 and CEO/chairman from 2003 to 2008 and is a Fujitsu
director.
The Complaint alleges much more than digital fraud. However, the digital fraud is the most
creative and innovative fraud yet seen on the Internet. (See Exhibit 15, reproduced at:
Representing LinkCo are Peter Shapiro, Linda Unger and Siobhan Murphy, partners in the
prestigious 600-attorney law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP.
In 1995, the Japanese government mandated a national program they called the "Financial Big
Bang." The government's intention was to have completely digitized, consolidated and unified
financial disclosure and reporting across Japan and also globally accessible via the Internet. At the
time, Japan's highly complex disclosure practices were paper based. The transformation to digitally
based disclosure systems was overwhelming.
David Israel-Rosen, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) trained innovation expert,
saw the need and had a bold idea of how to make this work. He took his idea for a new system to a
friend, MIT research scientist and lecturer Oded Maimon, an established authority on database and
information disclosure technology. Between them the partners devised an ingenious and workable
system by which Japanese companies could create disclosure databases online in order to
produce reports and support inquiries and searches via the Internet, all in a remarkably effective,
easy to use and cost-effective way. They made this system the basis of a new company they
created and called LinkCo. Under LinkCo, they then filed and obtained a US patent for their
Corporate Disclosure and Repository System. They had solved Japan's business reporting and
disclosure challenge and met the challenge of Japan's "Financial Big Bang."
Israel-Rosen then set out to find a corporate client in Japan. The logical collaborative partner, he
believed, would be Fujitsu, a global IT provider with $53 billion in sales. Interest sparked, Fujitsu
invited Israel-Rosen to discuss LinkCo's approach. To make the case, Israel-Rosen brought in a
third LinkCo partner, Jim Cook, a former MIT research engineer. What happened next -- the
complete willful theft of LinkCo's intellectual property by Fujitsu and its subsidiary and affiliate
companies -- would define the next several years of Israel-Rosen's life.
LinkCo sued Fujitsu, and won in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New
York. On November 6, 2002, Fujitsu's misappropriation of LinkCo's intellectual property was
affirmed by unanimous jury verdict: LinkCo, Inc. v. Fujitsu Ltd., No. 00 Civ 7242(SAS).
As it turned out, however, justice had not been served. In the years after this suit was settled,
through tremendous effort, time and money, Israel-Rosen with his partner, Jim Cook, together
discovered the compelling evidence behind this complaint. Specifically, even during the litigation,
Fujitsu embarked on a program of shifting its sales to identical but newly named products in
entities hidden from the court. Not until after the trial, was LinkCo able to discover massive
evidence that its proprietary and valuable information has been used in multiple product lines by
multiple subsidiaries, affiliated companies and even third parties, creating enormous profits for
Fujitsu. Despite these facts, Chairman Akikusa swore to the court that Fujitsu's disclosure offerings
were limited to but one paltry product line, @DisclosureVision.
LinkCo's Israel-Rosen eventually discovered that Fujitsu, its CEO, its subsidiaries and affiliates
engaged in an enormous cover-up of Fujitsu's activities in order to deceive LinkCo and the Court
as to the true nature and extent of Fujitsu's misappropriation. The evidence he found showed that
Fujitsu, through control of witnesses, failure to disclose witnesses and tampering of evidence,
committed a fraud on LinkCo and on a US District Court in order to limit the extent of damages to
be paid to LinkCo. In order to sustain this fraud, Fujitsu engaged in the most innovative and
nefarious hacking of information ever seen on the Internet.
LinkCo conducted an analysis of the HTML code on Fujitsu web pages. This analysis showed
Fujitsu employed numerous creative devices to impede Internet discovery, such as displaying
incriminating text in white when the background is white so it can't be read. They also buried
specific incriminating text, such as dates and places, in cursor tags that are never translated (or
searchable). A third, but common, device was putting incriminating text in images that also are
never translated nor catalogued by search engines. These are explained in Exhibit 15, cited above.
LinkCo's new lawsuit also claims that Fujitsu fabricated the date of misappropriation to an earlier
date so that its multibillion-dollar projections of sales from products using LinkCo's trade secrets
would never be shown to the jury. As Ms. Unger, one of LinkCo's attorneys, explains, "In the
previous trial, a PriceWaterhouseCooper's Damages expert, Aaron Levko, testifying for LinkCo,
estimated that Fujitsu's damages due LinkCo were in excess of $550 million dollars. However,
because of the date Fujitsu attributed to the initial misappropriation, the Court did not allow Mr.
Levko to testify as to the full extent of LinkCo damages. Now we can show how, as LinkCo alleges
in its complaint, Fujitsu's deception of two months allowed Fujitsu to potentially escape a half billion
dollars or more of damages." "Additionally," she continues, "Fujitsu hid its international activities, a
move that could amount to an additional $300 million in damages. Factoring in interest since the
misappropriation, the total, not including punitive damages, is in excess of $1.5 billion."
SOURCE LinkCo, Inc.
CONTACT: Judy Katz for LinkCo,
+1-212-580-8833,
judy@katzcreative.com
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