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Money and malfeasance

SCO boss: I was offered $2 million by Utah’s top prosecutor

CEO recorded money talks and gave recording to feds, report says.

Jon Brodkin – | 40

Darl McBride, the former chief executive officer of SCO, says he was offered $2 million by the Utah attorney general in May 2009 in exchange for taking down a website criticizing an area business person. Still pursuing the years-long legal battle against Novell and IBM over Unix and Linux intellectual property, SCO needed money at the time.

McBride was controversial for claiming that SCO owned Unix copyrights and that corporate users of Linux owed his company licensing fees. SCO ultimately lost its battle, but in 2009 the legal wrangling was still going on.

Besides SCO's legal battles, McBride was trying to collect money he believed he was owed by a business person named Mark Robbins because of a failed investment deal. McBride set up a website called Skyline Cowboy to try to shame Robbins, and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff allegedly tried to convince McBride to stop going after Robbins.

An amount was discussed—$2 million. The money apparently never changed hands, but McBride recorded the conversation and later passed the recording on to federal agents investigating alleged misconduct in the attorney general's office.

The bizarre events were reported yesterday by the Salt Lake Tribune, which also published a partial transcript of the conversation between McBride and Shurtleff. The Tribune reports:

"He [Robbins] is very concerned, because he can’t get any deals done because people go out and see that [website]," Shurtleff says on the recording, before launching into the pitch: "What can I do?"

McBride says he needs $2 million. Shurtleff replies that he doesn’t think Robbins has that kind of money, but he believes he can get it from one of Robbins’ associates—Marc Sessions Jenson. A year earlier, Shurtleff’s office had charged Jenson with six securities-related felonies, but the businessman was free at the time as a result of a plea deal struck with the attorney general’s office.

"I think he’d do it," Shurtleff says. "I’ve kind of got a weird relationship [with Jenson] because he is still under a plea-in-abeyance program. We put him on a three-year plea-in-abeyance. He’s got to pay the money back. If he does that, the charges will be dropped… He’s got every motivation in the world."

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Later in the conversation, "McBride indicates if he could get a few million dollars, it would prolong the life of his company." But McBride reportedly never heard from Shurtleff again. Robbins and Jenson both said they had no involvement in Shurtleff's pitch to McBride and no intention of funding a payment, the Tribune reported.

McBride was fired by SCO in October 2009. Shurtleff left the attorney general's office in January of this year.

As we noted at the time of his firing, "McBride was the architect and public face of SCO's misguided campaign against Linux. He claimed that the open source operating system infringed on SCO's copyright and included a significant quantity of code stolen from Unix System V. On the basis of this claim, SCO threatened to sue a multitude of corporate Linux users and demanded hefty licensing fees."

Courts ruled that Novell was the rightful owner of Unix copyrights. In June 2010, SCO was denied a new trial seven years after the litigation began.

Photo of Jon Brodkin
Jon Brodkin Senior IT Reporter
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
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