Infineon execs to get prison terms

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[b]Infineon execs to get prison terms[/b]
[i]Four sales executives of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies have agreed to plead guilty to participating in a conspiracy to fix the prices of computer memory chips, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.
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The four men--three Germans and an American--will serve up to six months in prison and pay $250,000 each in fines, according to a plea agreement filed in federal district court in San Francisco. The agreement must be approved by the court.

The move comes two months after Infineon agreed to plead guilty to price-fixing charges and pay a $160 million fine as part of the Justice Department's 2-year-old probe into the prices of dynamic random access memory, used in computers and other electronics.

Computer makers including Dell have long complained about high memory-chip prices, which are among the most volatile in the semiconductor industry.

"These four executives are the first to plead guilty to a charge of fixing prices in what is still a very active and far-reaching investigation into antitrust violations in the DRAM industry," Scott Hammond, the director of criminal enforcement for the Justice Department's antitrust department, said in a statement.

The computer memory industry is dominated by a handful of large companies--Infineon, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor, and U.S.-based Micron Technology. Each of the companies has acknowledged cooperating with the U.S. probe.

So far, the Justice Department has reached plea agreements with only one other memory industry executive, a regional sales manager for Micron named Alfred Censullo, who pleaded guilty in January to an obstruction of justice charge. The department has also sought documents from a former Samsung sales manager, who had refused to share any evidence.

The four executives named in the Infineon plea agreement are Heinrich Florian, who had been vice president for sales, marketing and logistics for memory products; Gunter Hefner, the vice president of sales for memory products; T. Rudd Corwin, who was Infineon North America's vice president for customer marketing and sales of memory products; and Peter Schaefer, who was the North America division's vice president for marketing, sales and logistics of memory products.

The four men, the Justice Department has charged, agreed to fix prices of DRAM chips in meetings held in the United States and elsewhere and ordered subordinate employees to participate in the alleged conspiracy.

Two of the Infineon executives have left or are leaving the company, and two have been reassigned to positions outside of sales, said Infineon spokesman Christoph Liedtke.

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