DeepL translation [0] of the submitted article [1]:

Software company SAP - With data theft to the top of the world?

12.11.2021 11:00 a.m., by Tim Bartz and Christian Bergmann, MDR

According to research by Fakt and "Der Spiegel," the theft of intellectual property by SAP could have a long tradition. As early as 1997 to 2008, the company allegedly misused competitors' developments in cooperation with universities.

Newly surfaced internal documents cast a dark shadow over the software company SAP, its management and supervisory board. According to research by the ARD magazine Fakt and "Der Spiegel," the picture of a company that apparently also tricked its way to the top of the world with unfair methods, especially theft of intellectual property, is emerging.

The events date back to the 1990s and are recorded in an expert report by the law firm Linklaters from 2010. The report was commissioned by SAP itself.

The background to this was the legal dispute with Oracle at the time. The U.S. archrival had sued SAP in 2007 because the Germans had gained access to copyrighted files from Oracle servers through the acquisition of the software service provider TomorrowNow. In a settlement, SAP later had to pay Oracle $357 million in damages.

The Linklaters expert opinion was intended to clarify whether liability claims exist against the then executive board member Gerhard Oswald - Oswald was responsible for the TomorrowNow acquisition. The document contains numerous indications that Oswald and one of his employees knew about copyright infringements. In addition, the SAP Executive Board under CEO Henning Kagermann at the time allegedly approved everything.

However, the company's top management did not draw any conclusions from the report. Oswald was even promoted, although the Linklaters lawyers had recommended that he be parted with "without making any noise". Oswald, a confidant of SAP founder and major shareholder Dietmar Hopp, remained on the executive board until 2016 and has been on the supervisory board since 2019.

Dubious cooperation between University of Mannheim and SAP

Fakt and "Spiegel" also report on a dubious cooperation between SAP and the University of Mannheim starting in 1997, in which Oswald again played a central role. This is also the subject of the report. Officially, the purpose 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 spied on the competition under the guise of the cooperation. Even interventions by the legal department, the compliance team and the auditing department were largely ignored.

According to information from Fakt and "Spiegel," SAP went all the way to the German Constitutional Court to prevent the Mannheim public prosecutor's office from using the report as evidence in an investigation against SAP executives for copyright infringement. Officials had come across the document in 2011 during a raid on the company's headquarters.

Germany's highest court did not accept the constitutional complaint at the time. The criminal proceedings against the board members were dropped at the end of 2017, but SAP had to pay 250,000 euros to the state treasury.

SAP said on request that the copyright infringements by TomorrowNow had been the subject of the proceedings with Oracle, which were settled amicably and had been concluded. The events surrounding the University of Mannheim had been comprehensively processed internally. The protection of intellectual property is the foundation of all SAP solutions.

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[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/mdr/sap-geistiges-eig...