John Linton
....and it's going to cost us a lot of money to find out if this dreadful 'accusation' is really true?
I read some of the background behind this 'story' last night:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25888897-36418,00.html
and, assuming the reporting is correct, which of course it may not be, you have to come to the conclusion that there may be a particular kind of 'culture' within Telstra that is not what an averagely reasonable person might expect. I noticed the 'apology' at the end of the article to the effect that:
"Telstra's humbling admission to the ACCC's allegations is in stark contrast to the combative stance the telco adopted under the tutelage of former chief executive Sol Trujillo. But with Mr Trujillo out of the picture, new chief executive David Thodey has moved to clear its legal deck of any embarrassing anti-competitive misdemeanors."
You can see the tack being offered by Telstra summed up in these two sentences:
"It was all that nasty Trujillo's fault but now he's gone we will go back to being honest and nice"
Except of course that doesn't really seem to be the way it ever was, pre-Trujillo, if my memory has a slightly longer retention capability than a mentally challenged guppy. Well, at least not according to a Federal Court judge who seemed to find that Telstra went out of their way to act illegally for more than a decade before El Sol rocked up with his buddies to add their peerless insights to the Australian communications environment:
http://www.austlii.org/au/cases/cth/FCA/2009/422.html
It depends on an individual's view about how the actions of some employees, fully supported by their internal and external legal personnel, might have been completely unknown to any other personnel for such a very long period of time (over ten years in the second instance) and only represented some isolated 'maverick' behaviour of a few morally ambivalent employees rather than some deeper more widely spread 'cultural' implication.
It's possible that none of the current Telstra management had knowledge of, or were party to, the illegalities alleged in these two court cases but, on balance, is that really really very likely - and of course these are just two legal actions that have made the headlines because of their size and/or longevity of practice. They were also mounted by the Federally funded ACCC in one instance and a multi-billion dollar company in the second cited instance - you pretty much have to have that sort of financial clout to sue an entity the size of Telstra....very few commercial enterprises, no matter how clear cut they believe their case may be, can actually afford the time and money to use Australia's legal system against a fiercely legally oriented 'opponent' with very 'deep legal pockets'.
Who knows maybe these judgments were wrong and/or maybe Telstra will get the Optus one reversed on appeal - maybe Telstra's tens of thousands of employees rival George Washington for truthfulness and Gandhi for public probity and William Wilberforce for generosity of spirit and no employee of Telstra's in their history has ever told an untruth nor has committed an illegal/inappropriate act.
To me, sheer logic makes that a highly unlikely scenario (as indeed two judges seem to have found to be the case so recently) but, then again, stranger coincidences have happened. Of course a search of the legal sites on the net would reveal almost all large companies in this and any other industry have a similar legal track record and for similar reasons - they all use the vagaries of the 'justice' system to out spend possible 'complainants' as a matter of course......
.....and it does illustrate that very large companies do have the capacity, or at least in these two incidences it appears to be the case, to insist on their version of the truth even when it appears equally true, at least to another party that the reverse is the case, and to insist their version of the truth is correct via their high priced legal teams and their huge financial resources....and unfortunately tiny companies like Exetel almost always have suppliers who are 'gigantic' and fall in to this category.
Exetel has very little money and none at all when it comes to legal engagements but we are faced with no option but to take legal action to stop the death by a thousand tiny cuts that is our view of one of our supplier's wholesale billing systems and the processes that 'feed it' - at least as it applies to Exetel. One such billing system and its associated processes which seem to include (at least in Exetel's case) the contractual 'Red Queen' like ability to assert "if the supplier says it is the case then it is the case irrespective of what evidence may or may not exist to the contrary" are costing us a gradually increasing amount of money each month and that money is being obtained, in our opinion, by not very senior supplier employees being able to say words to the effect of "we say you're wrong - read the contract - case closed".
The only other possibility is that the supplier is correct and that every single thing a senior Exetel employee says is completely wrong and a total fabrication - in other words he is a pathological liar with no morals or ethics and spends months of his time fabricating incidents and documentation for the express purpose of defrauding one of Exetel's major suppliers.
To me, sheer logic, makes that a highly unlikely scenario......but the supplier insists it's the case......
....so we will find a magistrate who will be able to make a decision on the 'evidence' rather than on the basis that in 240 separate documented instances a senior Exetel employee has fabricated, obfuscated and lied outrageously - rather than having to rely on the absurd, to me, statement by a not very senior supplier employee that such is the case.
We have decided to respond to the perceived 'death by a thousand cuts' by using a 'thousand cuts' process of our own and seek repayment a few hundred dollars at a time via the magistrates courts around Sydney - apart from anything else we really do need to know whether one of our senior employees is a liar and a thief as, if we are to accept the supplier's view of 240 + different incidents is the only conclusion we can reach - and that is a grave cause for concern.
Either we are relying for Exetel legal compliance with the various acts that govern our operations on a deranged lunatic with criminal tendencies and who is a pathological liar or a supplier is significantly overcharging us. So we gave the go ahead to our lawyers to file the appropriate documents today in both this situation and one even more serious situation (both, strangely, involving the same supplier).
I don't now what is happening in simple commercial relationships when a tiny company like Exetel has to resort to legal action to resolve a common sense, blatantly clearly obvious, straight forward situation - that one of our senior people isn't a conniving, ethicless and morally bankrupt liar as alleged by the supplier.
I will look forward to having this personal slur and gross slander resolved by a court as clearly common sense and realism is not going to do it.