Cisco's Dirty Pool

Most know Cisco is pretty damn evil. Regardless this story should have you stopped in your tracks. Cisco literally had someone who was suing them for anti-trust, arrested and....amazingly enough Canada actually did it!

High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. An official court video camera recorded the proceedings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affably answering questions in an elegant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, however, two plainclothes women—the shorter one brandishing a badge—and two uniformed police officers entered the room. Adekeye was confused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the special judicial master conducting the hearing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

This is an ex-Cisco executive, a British citizen and never in trouble a day in his life. This is what the trumped up charges became:

Adekeye was described as a "sinister" figure of uncertain citizenship on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking that carried a penalty of almost half-a-millennium in prison.

Worse, Cisco managed to get this guy's bail denied:

Cisco had pushed for Adekeye's arrest, apparently as part of its litigation strategy to derail the damaging antitrust suit that Adekeye launched in December 2008. They allegedly wanted him kept in custody to pressure him into settling or withdrawing his suit; they succeeded in keeping him locked up for a month. Normally, on a case like this, a non-violent defendant without a criminal record who wasn't considered a flight risk would have been out on bail in a day.

Cisco has said in the past they want to be a Chinese company. Obviously part of that is to violate common law, civil rights and have anyone who's a bee in their bonnet locked up.

Read the entire story with video at Ars Technica.

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