One piece of news that has come out of the antitrust court proceedings of AMD (AMD) against Intel (INTC) is that key executives from the larger chip company did not save e-mails that might be pertinent to the case. These managers include CEO Paul Otellini and former Intel head Craig Barrett.
It is hard to imagine that Intel’s management did this on purpose. The missing e-mails might hide conversations with major PC companies like Dell (DELL) who bought Intel chips for many years, but did not do business with AMD.
But going to a judge and jury with some of the communications missing might well look like a purposeful act of deception.
There is a bizarre aspect to the story. Most e-mail communications are backed up on servers, so, even if they are deleted off a PC, they are preserved on a central server. How they disappeared from there is a case for Sherlock Holmes, and the answer may be worse than the original problem.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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