Sanjay Kumar: Hero or villain?

The Editor's Note I wrote last week, in which I defended former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar, seems to have caused at least one reader to just about lose his lunch. I argued that Kumar, who's serving a 12-year sentence in a New Jersey prison for accounting fraud, had spearheaded a remarkable transformation of CA, and that he doesn't deserve to be vilified for his mistakes when it was Kumar's predecessor, CA founder Charles Wang, who instilled the culture of fraud that permeated the company for years. I maintained that it was Wang who was ultimately responsible for the reign of terror at CA.

The reader is a former employee of Uccel, a mainframe software company that CA acquired in 1987, and that employed Kumar as director of software development. The reader's experience there led him to reach a much different conclusion about Kumar, and he e-mailed me last night to tell me about it. Here's what he had to say:

Don, I was a Senior Director at Uccel and interviewed Sanjay Kumar for a low-level manager job about six months before CA bought Uccel in 1987. Sanjay told me a number of lies that I personally knew could not be accurate, and some others that I verified with my large circle of friends in IT. I passed the fact that he told the lies to the top level of management at Uccel, but he was hired anyway. When Charles [Wang] and [his brother] Tony came in, they chose Sanjay (only with Uccel for six months) as the person to represent Uccel in New York. This was very strange and showed me that he was most likely a plant in Uccel. Sanjay became the manager of all of Uccel in the fall of 1987 when CA took over, and the rest is history. Clearly, Charles and Tony were crooked, and the IT industry knew it very well. I was offered a marketing position in New York, but I turned it down because of the well-known crooked character of Charles and Tony. I believe Sanjay was a strong part of the crimes of cover-up and lies and should have been required to pay far more than the $52 million because of all the impact on millions of people who had so strongly invested in CA. He is a crook and needs to stay in a real prison for the entire time. I strongly agree with you that Charles deserves 10 times the prison time, but Sanjay treated many of the excellent Uccel employees like dirt after he became their manager.

Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Sanjay is not the hero you make him out to be. He hurt millions of people with his ego and his following of Charles' sanctions. Please do not print my name in your magazine. I might end up in a bay somewhere.

As I told the reader, his perspective is an important one to add to the discussion. Any former Uccel employees care to chime in?