That didn't take long: Shareholders sue Oracle in 'fake cloud sales' row Just days after Oracle was sued by an ex-employee, who accused the IT giant of making up its cloud sales figures, its shareholders are now hauling the company into court. A complaint [PDF] filed on behalf of Oracle stockholders by investor Grover Klarfeld alleges that the database goliath put their investments in the company …
You might be right, after all its only 5 minutes ago this ellison asshole was doing a Blamer on the whole idea of the cloud. This accounting fiddle just sounds like part of their desperate scramble to catch up, and we all know how that's gonna play out.
>and we all know how that's gonna play out.
Usually pretty well for the cheating company (government sanctions wise) unless they go bankrupt and it makes national news. In fact the last time the US government actually tried to make an example out of a corrupt auditor the SCOTUS eventually ended up swatting their hand for dare sanctioning a more holy than God corporation. Maybe the market will rightfully punish them but usually that is temporary and easily overcame.
1. Buy a small number of shares in large companies
2. Wait for management to do something that causes a share price drop
3. Start a class action on behalf of all shareholders for losses
4. Reap the proceeds of the class action (token amount to other shareholders)
5. Rinse/Repeat
This suit is based on the reports of accounting fraud, which, if true, could lead to criminal charges. It is not about the decline of the stock price but that the decline was caused by the outing of falsified accounting statements not the normal ebb and flo of stock prices in reaction to market conditions. In other wards Leisure Suit Larry and some on his minions could be facing a vacation in Club Fed if the charges are true.
>Leisure Suit Larry and some on his minions could be facing a vacation in Club Fed
And here in the real world of lobbyists and regulatory capture Oracle will pay the equivalent of one day of profits in fines while not having to admit guilt and all that will come of this is an even shorter El Reg article about it. Corporations, more rights than people without any of the responsibilities.
Like the Blackburn case, the Klarfeld complaint would look to collect money from Oracle, in this case to be distributed to shareholders
What's the point of shareholders extracting money from their own company? I could understand it if they were suing Larry et al personally for compensation, but targeting the company only seems to benefit the legal vultures.
I imagine that it will be caught up in the terminology and so difficult to prove/disprove.
In my humble, alleged opinion:
* Oracle probably count their OMCS (Oracle Managed Cloud Services) revenue as "cloud" too when it is NOT cloud but traditional hosting/virtualisation
* Cloud incentivisation of the sales teams (i.e. bonus multipliers for anything "Cloud") will also probably lead to fuzzing of the classification of sales as "Cloud" when in fact it may be less clearcut. For example a hybrid on-premise and cloud deal might be recorded as all-cloud by Sales in order to hit their target/bonus level - regardless of the actual mix sold.
* Some Oracle Cloud offerings have a period of lock-in or a fixed term (rather than just being fully-flexible and month-to-month), which could mean that the full revenue stream might have been recognised up-front, rather than spread over the contractual period/schedule. (Bear in mind that many of the applications offered require a non-trivial amount of technical and functional work from the end-user organisation to migrate on or off)
In which case it then becomes a matter of nuance and interpretation and Oracle will need to have a solid back up explanation for their reporting and claims.
It's a bizarre looking glass world event when it turns out that it's not Oracle firing off another lawsuit but that it's on the receiving end instead.
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