Microsoft continues to pursue ITAC owner Barry Omesuh to gethold of the £2.5m he has been ordered to pay in damages after being foundguilty of intellectual property infringement.
The vendor has been handed the power to force Omesuh to sellhis properties, including his holiday home, in order to meet the debt after thereseller was found to be in contempt of court and sent down for nine months.
Omesuh has also landed himself a prison sentence because ofhis decision to try to hide the value of his assets in court.
“The defendant was a wholly unreliable witness who on hisown admission told a number of bare-face lies about relevant matters over aperiod of time,” in a statement send out to channel publications.
The case against ITAC has been rumbling on for years andMicrosoft was able to come out publicly and disclose it had won the case lastyear and swipe aside some channel speculation that it had lost the case againstthe reseller.
Graham Arthur, anti-piracy attorney at Microsoft UK, said thatall it wanted was a level playing field for the channel and was determined totake out of the equation anyone who undermined other partners.
We want to make sure that resellers caught cheating thesystem are held accountable for their damaging actions,” he said.
We caught ITAC trading illegally more than once which showshow determined we are to protect genuine, honest business from being undercutby unscrupulous traders,” he added.
The case against ITAC was launched five years ago in 2004when the vendor accused the reseller of parallel importing and selling productscheaper than UKrivals.
The waters were muddied by ITAC’s attempts to counter suethe vendor for making those claims and because the case went into the legalprocess some resellers believed that the vendor had lost the case.
But in February 2006 ITAC was ordered to pay £1m and pledgednot to do it again but then was found to be unlawfully trading software againand a court order was granted in March 2008 to freeze Omesuh’s assets andreveal what they were.
His flouting of that order has led to the current situation.
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