News Article
Infineon executives guilty of price fixing
Four executives of European chip making giant Infineon have been sentenced to six months in jail and fined $250,000 after pleading guilty to price fixing charges in the USA.
The four men – Heinrich Florian, Gunter Hefner, Peter Schaefer and T Rudd Corwin - admitted at the US District Court in San Francisco to involvement in a conspiracy in 2001 and 2002 to fix the price of DRAM chips.
Florian, Hefner and Schaefer are all German while Corwin is from the USA. According to an Infineon spokesman, two of the executives have since left the company, while the other two have been moved to new divisions.
The convictions come just months after Infineon was found guilty in September 2004 of conspiring to fix prices as part of wide-ranging investigation by the US Department of Justice into the memory chip market.
The company at that time agreed to pay a $160 million fine over five years. Infineon is not the only major chip maker to have been implicated in the Department of Justice probe.
In December 2003, New York-based Micron sales manager Alfred P Censullo pleaded guilty to misleading a grand jury investigation.
He admitted to modifying hand-written notes and withholding documents relating to phone calls in which Micron sales managers allegedly discussed the price of competitors’ DRAM chips.
South Korean memory maker Hynix Semiconductor has also been under investigation by the Department of Justice.
The four men – Heinrich Florian, Gunter Hefner, Peter Schaefer and T Rudd Corwin - admitted at the US District Court in San Francisco to involvement in a conspiracy in 2001 and 2002 to fix the price of DRAM chips.
Florian, Hefner and Schaefer are all German while Corwin is from the USA. According to an Infineon spokesman, two of the executives have since left the company, while the other two have been moved to new divisions.
The convictions come just months after Infineon was found guilty in September 2004 of conspiring to fix prices as part of wide-ranging investigation by the US Department of Justice into the memory chip market.
The company at that time agreed to pay a $160 million fine over five years. Infineon is not the only major chip maker to have been implicated in the Department of Justice probe.
In December 2003, New York-based Micron sales manager Alfred P Censullo pleaded guilty to misleading a grand jury investigation.
He admitted to modifying hand-written notes and withholding documents relating to phone calls in which Micron sales managers allegedly discussed the price of competitors’ DRAM chips.
South Korean memory maker Hynix Semiconductor has also been under investigation by the Department of Justice.
