- A former Oracle product manager has sued the tech giant, claiming it sold phantom or broken products as part of a cloud service geared to universities.
- Tayo Daramola said the company retaliated against him "reporting what was in fact a pattern of criminal acts," the suit said.
- He said he resisted participating in what he described as "misrepresentation and likely fraud," and subsequently filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the suit said.
- "We don't agree with the allegations and intend to vigorously defend the matter," an Oracle spokesperson said.
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A former Oracle product manager has accused the tech giant of selling phantom or broken products, and then forcing him out when he complained to federal authorities.
Tayo Daramola said he had uncovered problems with an Oracle cloud-based project geared to universities, including products that did not work or didn't even exist, according to a federal lawsuit filed in San Francisco. He said Oracle retaliated against him for "reporting what was in fact a pattern of criminal acts," the suit said.
"Oracle demoted Daramola, stripped him of meaningful responsibility … because Daramola recognized fraudulent behavior, refused to engage in it and reported it internally as such," the suit said.
Oracle rejected Daramola's claims. "We don't agree with the allegations and intend to vigorously defend the matter," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger said in a statement emailed to Business Insider.
Daramola, who lives in Montreal, worked for Oracle-owned NetSuite from November 2016 to October 2017 as a project manager for "University Book Store," a cloud service used by several educational institutions, including the University of Washington and University of Texas in Austin.
According to the suit, which was first reported by The Register, Daramola found out that Oracle sold products "it could not deliver and that were not functional."
"Daramola came to understand that the products sold to US customers in many cases did not exist, were not functional, and/or had not been developed at the time of the sale to the customer," the suit said. But he also realized that part of his job was to "ratify and promote Oracle's repeated misrepresentations to the customer," the suit said.
"This project management strategy was intended to gain Oracle 'runway' (time) to develop and obtain functionality for the non-existent software products Oracle had already sold to the customer while representing their existence and deliverability as of the time of sale," the suit said.
But Daramola resisted being part of what he called "misrepresentation and likely fraud," the suit said. His managers retaliated against him and he was eventually forced to leave after he filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC, the suit said.
The complaint is seeking general and punitive damages.
You can read the Daramola Complaint vs. Oracle here.
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