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Oracle settles court spat with fired cloud 'sales inflation whistleblower'
Terms of settlement not disclosed SHOCKER
Oracle has reached a settlement with a former finance manager who alleged she had been fired for refusing to follow what she believed to be unlawful accounting practices that bumped up the IT giant's cloud numbers.
In a filing [PDF] on Wednesday, the District Court of Northern California was told the dispute between Oracle and Svetlana Blackburn had been settled in principle.
The lawsuit was brought by Blackburn in June last year. She had worked as a senior finance manager covering SaaS and cloud revenue in North America for Oracle, a role from which she claimed she was fired for refusing to artificially inflate the division's sales.
Oracle countered that Blackburn had in fact worked at the company for less than a year, and was terminated because of her failures to meet the requirements of her role. At the time, Oracle prepped a counter-suit and spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger told The Register: "We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct."
Blackburn, Oracle claimed, had failed to raise the prospect of whistleblowing internally, nor had she made any allegations about unlawful accounting practices before she had been terminated.
While Oracle had denied any wrongdoing, the alleged financial maneuvers are not unheard of in the SaaS space, with IBM coming in for a stern grilling from trade customers for plumping up its cloud figures.
Oracle did not respond to The Register's enquiries. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. ®