Conley gets 10 months, fines in plea bargain

License crackdown wraps up criminal phase with postponed sentencing

HP’s attempts at keeping its e3000 servers fully licensed during resale finally came to a criminal close last month, when a US court passed sentence on a broker convicted of rigging bids on systems.

William Conley was given a sentence of five months in prison and five months of house arrest in exchange for admitting to the crime of honest services wire fraud. Conley was sentenced for bribing Mark Glazer, a former HP Canada employee who helped him rig bids on used HP equipment including HP 3000s. The sentencing was delayed twice, once at the defense’s request and once when the prosecution had a change of attorneys.

After months of legal parrying over HP 3000 license theft and civil racketeering charges, Glazer came forward to testify he’d accepted $73,000 in bribes from Conley in exchange for inside information on the winning bid price for HP 3000 and HP 9000 servers. Conley signed a plea agreement on October 27, 2000.

The sentence also included an order to pay HP $85,000 in restitution and $84,900 in fines to the court. The restitution is to be offset by a payment of $1.5 million which Conley already made to HP last year to settle the civil suit against him.

The maximum penalty for the charge of honest services wire fraud is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. US Attorney Chris Sonderby said at the time of Conley’s guilty plea that maximum sentence would be mitigated by sentencing guidelines and cooperation from Conley.

The language in the plea bargain which he signed prevents Conley from appealing the conviction and sentence. The government agreed not to further prosecute Conley for the possession and use of the SS_CONFIG software, a program which law enforcement agents claim to have found at the US Computer offices in a 1998 raid. The plea agreement estimated the HP loss in the matter at $85,000.