Oracle apparently has a way with people calling themselves whistle-blowers – it sues them.
Svetlana Blackburn complained in the US district court in San Francisco that she had been fired from the company for refusing to artificially inflate Oracle’s cloud division sales. She said that senior directors had been fudging its software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service figures.
Blackburn said she was a “senior finance manager” at Oracle and accused the database giant of serious financial wrongdoing.
Oracle said that Blackburn worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. It insists that she was terminated for poor performance. Oracle will be suing her for malicious prosecution.
But Oracle’s lawyers might not be the only ones investigating the lawsuit – the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is rather interested. If Blackburn has the evidence for her claims, Oracle is going to be in hot-water. If she doesn’t then Oracle is going to want blood.
Oracle’s shares took a battering when she went to court dropping four per cent and wiping about $6 billion off Oracle’s market cap. Oracle is fond of suing people for funny money.
