Late News (23 July)

• Greater Manchester Police have confirmed they are investigating a criminal case filed by Brother UK concerning the alleged theft of equipment from its Audenshaw premises.
• The Business Software Alliance has forged an out-of- court settlement with home gardening company Unwins Seeds after unlicensed copies of BSA members? software were found being used by Unwins employees. Unwins carried out a software audit in which 33 copies of the unlicensed software were discovered.
• Intel stands to lose about $1 billion in net income over the next four years due to lower revenues generated from price cuts on Pentium processors and the impact of leaks in sensitive information on its August pricing schedule, according to chip research firm Micro Design Resources.
• Noteholders of Merisel?s debt rejected a proposal from an investment company to buy 70 per cent of the distributor last week. New York-based Stonington Partners proposed to invest $152 million in Merisel and would have altered the distributor?s restructuring plan ? a move debtholders opposed. (See Page 4.)
• Computacenter has joined BT Intranet Complete ? a service developed by BT and US partner MCI with Microsoft to set up corporate intranets. The reseller will provide implementation services for planning, requisition integration and the management of desktop and Lan components of the intranet. Digital has joined the service, supplying Alpha and Intel-based servers.
• Christian Martin, chief executive of Azlan, has been sidelined in the restructuring of the board. Barrie Morgans, ex-chief executive of IBM, has been made group chief executive. Martin will now be responsible for field operations, vendor relations and training.