Exclusive
Status: 11/12/2021 11:00 a.m.
According to research by fact and the “Spiegel”, the theft of intellectual property by SAP could have a long tradition. As early as 1997 to 2008, the group is said to have abused developments by competitors in cooperation with universities.
Newly emerged internal documents cast a gloomy shadow over the software company SAP, its management and the supervisory board. After research by the ARD magazine fact and the “Spiegel” imposes the image of a company that has evidently also tricked its way into the top of the world with unfair methods, above all the theft of intellectual property.
The processes go back to the 1990s and are recorded in an expert report by the business law firm Linklaters from 2010. It was commissioned by SAP itself.
The background to this was the legal dispute with Oracle at the time. The US arch-rival sued SAP in 2007 because the Germans had gained access to copyrighted files from Oracle servers through the takeover of the software service provider TomorrowNow. In a settlement, SAP later had to pay Oracle $ 357 million in damages.
Despite the allegations, Oswald (left) was still a member of the SAP Executive Board until 2016 and later switched to the Supervisory Board.
Image: picture alliance / dpa
At the center is a Hopp confidante
The Linklaters report was intended to clarify whether there were any liability claims against the then board member Gerhard Oswald – Oswald was responsible for the TomorrowNow takeover. There are numerous indications in the document that Oswald and one of his employees knew of copyright infringement. In addition, the then SAP board under CEO Henning Kagermann is said to have approved everything.
The top management did not, however, draw any conclusions from the report. Oswald was even promoted, although the Linklaters lawyers had recommended parting with him “noiselessly”. Oswald, a confidante of SAP founder and major shareholder Dietmar Hopp, remained on the executive board until 2016 and has been a member of the supervisory board since 2019.
Dubious cooperation between the University of Mannheim and SAP
fact and “Spiegel” also report on a dubious cooperation between SAP and the University of Mannheim from 1997, in which Oswald again played a central role. It is also the subject of the report. Officially, the aim of the cooperation was to have competing software examined by an independent institute, in this case the business informatics research group at the University of Mannheim. In fact, SAP employees would have spied on the competition under the guise of cooperation. Even interventions by the legal department, the compliance team and auditing were largely ignored.
According to information from fact and “Spiegel” pulled SAP to the Federal Constitutional Court to prevent the Mannheim public prosecutor’s office from using the report as evidence in an investigation against SAP board members for copyright infringement. The officers found the document in 2011 during a raid on the company’s headquarters.
The highest German court did not accept the constitutional complaint at the time. The criminal proceedings against the board members were discontinued at the end of 2017, but SAP had to pay 250,000 euros to the state treasury.
Upon request, SAP announced that TomorrowNow’s copyright infringements had been the subject of the proceedings with Oracle, which were amicably settled and had been concluded. The processes around the University of Mannheim have been comprehensively prepared internally. The protection of intellectual property is the foundation of all SAP solutions.