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Intel's anti-trust memos started vanishing from the top

Chairman and CEO implicated in 'Tortellini Episode'

AMD vs Intel Intel's top executives have been playing "Hide and Seek the Anti-trust E-mails," according to a fresh set of court documents released over the weekend.

Chairman Craig Barrett, CEO Paul Otellini and sales chief Sean Maloney have appeared on a list of Intel employees thought to have deleted emails possibly relevant to AMD's anti-trust lawsuit against its larger rival. The missing emails have thrust a livid state of mind onto AMD's lawyers who have very serious problems with Intel's rather lax document retention policy.

Lawyers from Intel and AMD met on Wednesday to discuss the missing emails with Special Master Vincent Poppiti.

"So it's Barrett, who is the chairman, Otellini who is the CEO, and a number of their direct reports, who are already identified as noncompliant, including Sean Maloney, who is the worldwide head of sales and marketing, and a number of other very critical guys," an AMD representative noted during the hearing, according to a transcript.

"This is the absolute top level. And these are the folks that, even if there's only a two, three, four-month gap, they're the major players who are communication with the heads of other companies."

Intel faced the daunting task of amassing millions upon millions of documents to satisfy AMD's lawyers, who have launched an anti-trust lawsuit against the giant. Regrettably, Intel decided upon a manual document retention procedure in which employees would move their emails off a PC onto a hard drive. Intel has admitted that some employees failed to follow these procedures.

CEO Otellini appears to have been one of these troublesome employees.

"We show, based on Intel's report, that (Otellini) was harvested on July 12th, 2005," an AMD representative noted, according to the transcript. "He is identified as an individual who was under the impression that IT was automatically backing up his email and so he did not need to retain them, according to Intel."

Intel is building out an automatic backup system to help cutback on such unfortunate errors. It's also looking through workers' email files to try and find duplications of lost conversations. Lastly, Intel hopes to find a number of the missing emails when it reviews a large backup made last year.

Judge Poppiti is continuing to review these matters with attorneys from both sides.

In the meantime, the judge looks set to take on a special technology assistant to help him sort through the document issues and future tech items. Representatives from both AMD and Intel signaled a desire for such an assistant. ®

Bootnote

There's a lovely moment in the transcript where an AMD rep struggles with Otellini's name. "Every time I put (Otellini) in my spell check, it asks me if I mean 'tortellini,'" she remarked.

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