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This is pretty appalling...
A pound of flesh: how Cisco's "unmitigated gall" derailed one man's life
High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. An official court video camera recorded the proceedings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affably answering questions in an elegant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.
At 5:15pm, however, two plainclothes women—the shorter one brandishing a badge—and two uniformed police officers entered the room. Adekeye was confused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the special judicial master conducting the hearing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.
"I'm from the RCMP," the taller woman said, "I'm sorry I have to interrupt your meeting here."
"Hello," Adekeye said.
"I'm looking for—are you a Mr. Peter Alfred-Adekeye?"
"Yes."
"How do you say your name?"
"Add-a-kay."
"Add-a-kay," she repeated.
The lawyers interjected—"this is off the record," "on the record."
"I just want to speak with you," the officer continued. "Mr. Adekeye, the reason I'm here..."
"Wait, we're conducting a deposition here," the special master said as decorum collapsed and the video was shut off.
The recording resumed at 5:40pm, the camera focused on an empty chair with the special master speaking. "The interruption makes it impossible to continue the deposition today and, in my opinion, tomorrow," he said. "So I think that this deposition will be suspended until further notice."
Meanwhile, Adekeye was being perp-walked through the swanky hotel lobby, paraded past its well-heeled and powerful patrons and into a waiting paddy wagon. With that, the former Cisco executive, a British citizen with a blemish-free record and a sterling resume, dropped down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole that would tie up a year of his life.
The judge who freed Adekeye a year later said the public would "blanche at the audacity" of the conduct of Cisco and US prosecutors, both of whom turned out to be involved in Adekeye's jailing and persecution.
The "crime"
A week after his arrest and imprisonment, Adekeye appeared before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Arne Silverman, a six-year veteran of the province's highest trial bench. Adekeye was described as a "sinister" figure of uncertain citizenship on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking that carried a penalty of almost half-a-millennium in prison.
Canadian prosecutors said that, according to US Homeland Security, Adekeye slipped in and out of the US surreptitiously—and they could match up the dates of the offenses with dates he had unlawfully entered the country over a two-year period.
They made it sound like the crime of the century; in fact, throughout the specified time, Adekeye was living in America on a valid visa. And the heinous crime was accessing Cisco's internal systems on several occasions with a Cisco employee's permission.
As he stood in court for his first appearance, Adekeye couldn't believe what he heard—his citizenship was disparaged, his achievements derided. Prosecutors portrayed him not as a successful computer executive and innovator but rather as a Nigerian scofflaw who was a serious flight risk with a checkered, fugitive's past.
Justice Silverman was told the Canadian government had invoked the emergency provisions of the Extradition Act to obtain the arrest warrant—this case was that important and urgent. The judge who had issued the warrant had heard a similarly misleading story about Adekeye, who has held British citizenship since 2004; US prosecutors claimed they didn't have time to file a full extradition request because Adekeye might flee the country.
The extradition documentation was mostly a pack of "innuendo, half truths, and complete falsehoods," as a judge would later find, but it was impossible for Adekeye to counter without obtaining documentation from Europe. He was denied bail and would remain in custody for 28 days while his lawyers mustered supporting material to refute the charges presented to the court. He was finally released only under strict bail conditions that forced him to surrender his passport and remain in Vancouver unless given permission to travel elsewhere in Canada.
By then, he understood only too well how he had been pursued by Cisco. The Canadian authorities, however, and the judges who issued the arrest warrant and denied Adekeye bail, remained in the dark. They were unaware Adekeye's alleged crimes were part of a bigger legal battle he was waging against the $7 billion computer firm.
As part of its response to his litigation, Cisco had accused Adekeye in a civil countersuit of using his former colleague's computer credentials to obtain services worth "more than $14,000." No one ever explained the "magic" of that number—whether it meant $15,000 or $1 million—even the judges couldn't figure it out.
Cisco had pushed for Adekeye's arrest, apparently as part of its litigation strategy to derail the damaging antitrust suit that Adekeye launched in December 2008. They allegedly wanted him kept in custody to pressure him into settling or withdrawing his suit; they succeeded in keeping him locked up for a month. Normally, on a case like this, a non-violent defendant without a criminal record who wasn't considered a flight risk would have been out on bail in a day.
Good relationships gone bad
Adekeye holds a B.Sc. with honors in Civil Engineering from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife and has completed executive leadership development courses at Stanford University. He earned a program leader certification from Kepner-Tregoe (the international management consulting training company), is a master troubleshooter, and an expert on ancient Japanese martial arts. He has founded two nonprofit initiatives to foster the growth of entrepreneurship and technology to improve global human capital development.
Cisco hired Adekeye in London after he had earned a reputation working in various engineering positions at IBM Global Services and at AT&T Global Network Services. As a senior UK executive within Cisco's advanced engineering services group, Adekeye dealt with strategic ISP clients that had network assets in excess of US$1 billion—companies such as AT&T, Level 3, UUNet/WorldCom and Global Crossing.
In 2003, Cisco moved him to the US. From the outside, Adekeye appeared to excel in various technical and non-technical leadership positions at Cisco. He led the Core Architecture Solutions group, which was responsible for all source code-level IOS and IOS-XR operating system software, ASIC-level hardware, and technology concerns raised by Internet service providers, governments, and Fortune 500 customers worldwide. He also was intimately involved with the company's router-systems units.
He lived in America under different visas and work permits until he left Cisco to form his own Silicon Valley companies in 2005: Multiven, a global provider of Internet infrastructure maintenance services, and Pingsta, an expertise-in-the-cloud software and services provider along with its open Internet intelligence repository, mySolvr.
Almost from the start, Cisco complained that Adekeye was trading on his insider knowledge of its products and was poaching key employees. He denied their accusations.
In 2008, Adekeye moved back to Britain and later to Zurich. On December 1, 2008, Multiven initiated litigation that alleged Cisco harmed it and consumers by forcing customers to buy maintenance contracts for Cisco operating systems and applications, contracts that covered future bug fixes and updates. (Think of a car dealer able to force all customers to return for every repair and servicing.) If successful, the suit would have enormous repercussions for Cisco.
As the case moved through the courts, Adekeye attempted to return to America to participate. He was denied entry. He tried unsuccessfully for months to get back into the US but was continually refused. He even wrote without success to President Barack Obama seeking his intervention.
When the judge handling the antitrust suit was informed of the problem, Cisco was offered the opportunity to depose Adekeye in Switzerland or Britain. But a request would first have to be made to the government in either country and the cost of such an undertaking would be considerable. Cisco balked. As a result, the court chose Vancouver—a short flight from San Jose and a city in a country that apparently didn't have to be informed of a foreign judicial hearing occurring on its soil. Vancouver fit the bill: easy to get to, no complications, and inexpensive. Cisco agreed.
Far from trying to avoid a showdown, Adekeye, denied legal entry to America, flew from Zurich to Vancouver to testify. Early on May 20, however, after two days of hearings, Cisco officials in California swore out a criminal complaint against Adekeye based on the allegations of illegal computer access.
According to a later ruling from a US judge overseeing the Multiven/Cisco litigation, Adekeye had in fact used a Cisco employee's login credentials (with the employee's permission) to access Cisco's secure internal network on multiple occasions. Adekeye "admitted that his reason for accessing Cisco's secure website was to gather information about which Cisco employees have access to 'bug fixes,'" wrote the judge. Adekeye said that he believed the Cisco employee's authorization constituted "permission" to access the network, but the judge disagreed that this was a reasonable belief to hold.
Based on this charge, Cisco complained to federal officials and told US authorities that Adekeye had left their jurisdiction but was in Vancouver and might flee.
Cisco issued a brief statement in response to my inquiries. "The US Secret Service issued a criminal complaint after nearly two years of investigation alleging that Mr. Adekeye violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 97 distinct instances, and as a result a federal judge signed an arrest warrant for Mr. Adekeye," it said. "Ultimately, this case is a matter between US and Canadian governmental authorities.
"Cisco also sued Mr. Adekeye based on evidence that he, the CEO of Multiven and an ex-employee of Cisco, stole information and software from Cisco using a current employee's credentials. The judge in that case found that Mr. Adekeye's conduct violated the federal anti-hacking statute."
The authorities sprang into action, calling the Canadian government and urging it to use extraordinary powers to arrest Adekeye. Within hours, federal prosecutors were before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask seeking a warrant, painting their dire picture of a nefarious suspect and conjuring a burning sense of urgency. But Canada had been duped.
The settlement
Two months after Adekeye's arrest, Cisco settled Multiven's antitrust suit with an effective date of July 19, 2010—the day before the US judge overseeing the case ruled that Adekeye had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (This put the judge's ruling into a sort of legal limbo.)
More importantly, Cisco abandoned its previous service contract practices. Adekeye had won and, although all the details of the out-of-court settlement were not made public, Multiven and others now could service Cisco products.
In addition, Cisco also dropped the illicit computer access charge against Adekeye. Strangely, none of that halted the extradition proceedings against him in Vancouver—that would take another nine months.
"This is the other astonishing thing that has me scratching my head," said his local lawyer, Marilyn Sandford. "The civil claim was settled and the counter-claim [over the $14,000 in computer access] was dropped and my client and his companies didn't pay one nickel to Cisco. Yet the extradition case continues. It boggles the mind."
"It is simply not done"
In May 2011, nearly a year to the day after his deposition and arrest, Adekeye was vindicated. In a stinging decision, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ronald McKinnon rebuked both Canadian and American authorities for an appalling abuse of process and, in a rare move, he stayed extradition proceedings against Adekeye. (Read McKinnon's complete ruling [PDF].)
Justice McKinnon was stunned that a trivial $14,000 civil tort had been transformed into a criminal proceeding so as to engage the full might and resources of two governments and to mislead one of Canada's senior trial courts. It was shocking, he said.
The justice dismissed three thick volumes of legal precedent filed by Canadian federal government lawyer Diba Majzub, who said that it didn't matter if Adekeye was falsely characterized. At the end of the last century, after several high-profile requests dragged on for years (some as long as a decade), the government changed the Extradition Act to make the court's job little more than that of a rubber stamp. It was America's job, said Majzub, to rule on the merits of Adekey's case—not Canada's.
Only five times since 1999 has a Canadian judge refused to send a fugitive to America to face justice because of an abuse of process. All were extraordinary cases involving, for instance, a terror suspect captured and tortured overseas. Majzub, who represented the US at the hearing, offered no reasonable explanation from American authorities or from Cisco for what had happened. He said only that any mistakes were made in good faith; no one was being malicious or acting out of improper motives.
Nevertheless, Justice McKinnon said US prosecutors acted outrageously by having the executive arrested during his deposition in front of Cisco's lawyers, who could only have been delighted at his humiliation. (As Adekeye's company later put it, "The arrest took place in the presence of a US High Court Judge appointed Special Master, Mr. George Fisher, with Cisco's lawyers insisting on filming the entire arrest 'on the record.'")
"It speaks volumes for Cisco's duplicity," the judge fumed.
Justice McKinnon was flabbergasted that police had interrupted a judicial proceeding to nab Adekeye. "It is simply not done in a civilized jurisdiction that is bound by the rule of law," he said.
For centuries, going back at least to the 1500s, the custom and law in Britain and the nations that adopted its legal system was unequivocally clear: you don't arrest people while they are testifying. This was an egregious abuse of process and brought the administration of justice into disrepute, Justice Mackinnon concluded, adding it was obvious the RCMP didn't realize they were barging into a court hearing.
He suggested that Adekeye's ordeal was something out of Catch-22, the celebrated Joseph Heller novel. He also said Cisco had "the unmitigated gall" to try and use the criminal process to humiliate and force Adekeye to abandon the civil suit. At best, the allegations of criminal computer access, if real, should have been consolidated to a single charge carrying at most 15 years imprisonment.
Regardless, Justice McKinnon said, it was a perversion of justice to allow the criminal law to be used to resolve a trivial civil suit and it shouldn't be countenanced. If Canada had known the true facts, he maintained it would not have proceeded.
"Here we have a man who has no criminal record, who made every possible effort to comply with US immigration laws and procedures, but who dared to take on a multinational giant, rewarded with criminal charges that have been so grotesquely inflated as to make the average well-informed member of the public blanche at the audacity of it all," Justice McKinnon added.
The entire incident, in his opinion, was a planned and deliberate act by Cisco with the collusion of the US prosecutors to transform a minor civil complaint into a criminal charge requiring 500 years imprisonment. All the US had to do was let Adekeye into the country, Justice McKinnon said, but instead astoundingly misled Canada into launching expensive legal proceedings.
Back to Europe
"Almost nothing in the US attorney's letter was true," Adekeye's lawyer Sandford said afterwards. The prosecutors relied on innuendo and half-truths to dupe Justice Leask into issuing the arrest warrant and Justice Silverman into jailing Adekeye.
Sandford called the US conduct careless, cavalier, and Kafkaesque. She scoffed at the excuses. Cisco has a reputation for playing litigation hardball, she said, and she thought this was another example of that take-no-prisoners strategy. For instance, the company recently was ordered to pay nearly $75 million in a patent infringement fight during which the true patent owner complained, as one Israeli newspaper put it, that he was portrayed as "a greedy Jew who wanted to fill his pockets with money and take it to Israel."
"There is nothing wrong with aggression in litigation but there are rules and standards of fair play and they were not adhered to by this civil litigation," Sandford added. "This litigant wanted its pound of flesh."
Adekeye left Canada immediately after the verdict. He planned to spend time in London with his daughter and then rejoin his wife and two-year-old son in Switzerland. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Sandford said that Adekeye remains shaken by the ordeal and is considering seeking redress. Still, she added: "He's overjoyed it's over."
High-tech entrepreneur Peter Adekeye's yearlong nightmare began after he dropped his wife off at the Vancouver International airport and headed downtown to The Wedgewood, a posh boutique hotel. Inside a tasteful boardroom adorned with gilt-framed mirrors, the US District Court for Northern California, San Jose division, had convened a special sitting to hear Adekeye's deposition as part of a massive antitrust action he had launched against his former employer, the computer giant Cisco Systems. An official court video camera recorded the proceedings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affably answering questions in an elegant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.
At 5:15pm, however, two plainclothes women—the shorter one brandishing a badge—and two uniformed police officers entered the room. Adekeye was confused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the special judicial master conducting the hearing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.
"I'm from the RCMP," the taller woman said, "I'm sorry I have to interrupt your meeting here."
"Hello," Adekeye said.
"I'm looking for—are you a Mr. Peter Alfred-Adekeye?"
"Yes."
"How do you say your name?"
"Add-a-kay."
"Add-a-kay," she repeated.
The lawyers interjected—"this is off the record," "on the record."
"I just want to speak with you," the officer continued. "Mr. Adekeye, the reason I'm here..."
"Wait, we're conducting a deposition here," the special master said as decorum collapsed and the video was shut off.
The recording resumed at 5:40pm, the camera focused on an empty chair with the special master speaking. "The interruption makes it impossible to continue the deposition today and, in my opinion, tomorrow," he said. "So I think that this deposition will be suspended until further notice."
Meanwhile, Adekeye was being perp-walked through the swanky hotel lobby, paraded past its well-heeled and powerful patrons and into a waiting paddy wagon. With that, the former Cisco executive, a British citizen with a blemish-free record and a sterling resume, dropped down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole that would tie up a year of his life.
The judge who freed Adekeye a year later said the public would "blanche at the audacity" of the conduct of Cisco and US prosecutors, both of whom turned out to be involved in Adekeye's jailing and persecution.
The "crime"
A week after his arrest and imprisonment, Adekeye appeared before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Arne Silverman, a six-year veteran of the province's highest trial bench. Adekeye was described as a "sinister" figure of uncertain citizenship on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking that carried a penalty of almost half-a-millennium in prison.
Canadian prosecutors said that, according to US Homeland Security, Adekeye slipped in and out of the US surreptitiously—and they could match up the dates of the offenses with dates he had unlawfully entered the country over a two-year period.
They made it sound like the crime of the century; in fact, throughout the specified time, Adekeye was living in America on a valid visa. And the heinous crime was accessing Cisco's internal systems on several occasions with a Cisco employee's permission.
As he stood in court for his first appearance, Adekeye couldn't believe what he heard—his citizenship was disparaged, his achievements derided. Prosecutors portrayed him not as a successful computer executive and innovator but rather as a Nigerian scofflaw who was a serious flight risk with a checkered, fugitive's past.
Justice Silverman was told the Canadian government had invoked the emergency provisions of the Extradition Act to obtain the arrest warrant—this case was that important and urgent. The judge who had issued the warrant had heard a similarly misleading story about Adekeye, who has held British citizenship since 2004; US prosecutors claimed they didn't have time to file a full extradition request because Adekeye might flee the country.
The extradition documentation was mostly a pack of "innuendo, half truths, and complete falsehoods," as a judge would later find, but it was impossible for Adekeye to counter without obtaining documentation from Europe. He was denied bail and would remain in custody for 28 days while his lawyers mustered supporting material to refute the charges presented to the court. He was finally released only under strict bail conditions that forced him to surrender his passport and remain in Vancouver unless given permission to travel elsewhere in Canada.
By then, he understood only too well how he had been pursued by Cisco. The Canadian authorities, however, and the judges who issued the arrest warrant and denied Adekeye bail, remained in the dark. They were unaware Adekeye's alleged crimes were part of a bigger legal battle he was waging against the $7 billion computer firm.
As part of its response to his litigation, Cisco had accused Adekeye in a civil countersuit of using his former colleague's computer credentials to obtain services worth "more than $14,000." No one ever explained the "magic" of that number—whether it meant $15,000 or $1 million—even the judges couldn't figure it out.
Cisco had pushed for Adekeye's arrest, apparently as part of its litigation strategy to derail the damaging antitrust suit that Adekeye launched in December 2008. They allegedly wanted him kept in custody to pressure him into settling or withdrawing his suit; they succeeded in keeping him locked up for a month. Normally, on a case like this, a non-violent defendant without a criminal record who wasn't considered a flight risk would have been out on bail in a day.
Good relationships gone bad
Adekeye holds a B.Sc. with honors in Civil Engineering from the University of Ife, Ile-Ife and has completed executive leadership development courses at Stanford University. He earned a program leader certification from Kepner-Tregoe (the international management consulting training company), is a master troubleshooter, and an expert on ancient Japanese martial arts. He has founded two nonprofit initiatives to foster the growth of entrepreneurship and technology to improve global human capital development.
Cisco hired Adekeye in London after he had earned a reputation working in various engineering positions at IBM Global Services and at AT&T Global Network Services. As a senior UK executive within Cisco's advanced engineering services group, Adekeye dealt with strategic ISP clients that had network assets in excess of US$1 billion—companies such as AT&T, Level 3, UUNet/WorldCom and Global Crossing.
In 2003, Cisco moved him to the US. From the outside, Adekeye appeared to excel in various technical and non-technical leadership positions at Cisco. He led the Core Architecture Solutions group, which was responsible for all source code-level IOS and IOS-XR operating system software, ASIC-level hardware, and technology concerns raised by Internet service providers, governments, and Fortune 500 customers worldwide. He also was intimately involved with the company's router-systems units.
He lived in America under different visas and work permits until he left Cisco to form his own Silicon Valley companies in 2005: Multiven, a global provider of Internet infrastructure maintenance services, and Pingsta, an expertise-in-the-cloud software and services provider along with its open Internet intelligence repository, mySolvr.
Almost from the start, Cisco complained that Adekeye was trading on his insider knowledge of its products and was poaching key employees. He denied their accusations.
In 2008, Adekeye moved back to Britain and later to Zurich. On December 1, 2008, Multiven initiated litigation that alleged Cisco harmed it and consumers by forcing customers to buy maintenance contracts for Cisco operating systems and applications, contracts that covered future bug fixes and updates. (Think of a car dealer able to force all customers to return for every repair and servicing.) If successful, the suit would have enormous repercussions for Cisco.
As the case moved through the courts, Adekeye attempted to return to America to participate. He was denied entry. He tried unsuccessfully for months to get back into the US but was continually refused. He even wrote without success to President Barack Obama seeking his intervention.
When the judge handling the antitrust suit was informed of the problem, Cisco was offered the opportunity to depose Adekeye in Switzerland or Britain. But a request would first have to be made to the government in either country and the cost of such an undertaking would be considerable. Cisco balked. As a result, the court chose Vancouver—a short flight from San Jose and a city in a country that apparently didn't have to be informed of a foreign judicial hearing occurring on its soil. Vancouver fit the bill: easy to get to, no complications, and inexpensive. Cisco agreed.
Far from trying to avoid a showdown, Adekeye, denied legal entry to America, flew from Zurich to Vancouver to testify. Early on May 20, however, after two days of hearings, Cisco officials in California swore out a criminal complaint against Adekeye based on the allegations of illegal computer access.
According to a later ruling from a US judge overseeing the Multiven/Cisco litigation, Adekeye had in fact used a Cisco employee's login credentials (with the employee's permission) to access Cisco's secure internal network on multiple occasions. Adekeye "admitted that his reason for accessing Cisco's secure website was to gather information about which Cisco employees have access to 'bug fixes,'" wrote the judge. Adekeye said that he believed the Cisco employee's authorization constituted "permission" to access the network, but the judge disagreed that this was a reasonable belief to hold.
Based on this charge, Cisco complained to federal officials and told US authorities that Adekeye had left their jurisdiction but was in Vancouver and might flee.
Cisco issued a brief statement in response to my inquiries. "The US Secret Service issued a criminal complaint after nearly two years of investigation alleging that Mr. Adekeye violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 97 distinct instances, and as a result a federal judge signed an arrest warrant for Mr. Adekeye," it said. "Ultimately, this case is a matter between US and Canadian governmental authorities.
"Cisco also sued Mr. Adekeye based on evidence that he, the CEO of Multiven and an ex-employee of Cisco, stole information and software from Cisco using a current employee's credentials. The judge in that case found that Mr. Adekeye's conduct violated the federal anti-hacking statute."
The authorities sprang into action, calling the Canadian government and urging it to use extraordinary powers to arrest Adekeye. Within hours, federal prosecutors were before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask seeking a warrant, painting their dire picture of a nefarious suspect and conjuring a burning sense of urgency. But Canada had been duped.
The settlement
Two months after Adekeye's arrest, Cisco settled Multiven's antitrust suit with an effective date of July 19, 2010—the day before the US judge overseeing the case ruled that Adekeye had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (This put the judge's ruling into a sort of legal limbo.)
More importantly, Cisco abandoned its previous service contract practices. Adekeye had won and, although all the details of the out-of-court settlement were not made public, Multiven and others now could service Cisco products.
In addition, Cisco also dropped the illicit computer access charge against Adekeye. Strangely, none of that halted the extradition proceedings against him in Vancouver—that would take another nine months.
"This is the other astonishing thing that has me scratching my head," said his local lawyer, Marilyn Sandford. "The civil claim was settled and the counter-claim [over the $14,000 in computer access] was dropped and my client and his companies didn't pay one nickel to Cisco. Yet the extradition case continues. It boggles the mind."
"It is simply not done"
In May 2011, nearly a year to the day after his deposition and arrest, Adekeye was vindicated. In a stinging decision, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ronald McKinnon rebuked both Canadian and American authorities for an appalling abuse of process and, in a rare move, he stayed extradition proceedings against Adekeye. (Read McKinnon's complete ruling [PDF].)
Justice McKinnon was stunned that a trivial $14,000 civil tort had been transformed into a criminal proceeding so as to engage the full might and resources of two governments and to mislead one of Canada's senior trial courts. It was shocking, he said.
The justice dismissed three thick volumes of legal precedent filed by Canadian federal government lawyer Diba Majzub, who said that it didn't matter if Adekeye was falsely characterized. At the end of the last century, after several high-profile requests dragged on for years (some as long as a decade), the government changed the Extradition Act to make the court's job little more than that of a rubber stamp. It was America's job, said Majzub, to rule on the merits of Adekey's case—not Canada's.
Only five times since 1999 has a Canadian judge refused to send a fugitive to America to face justice because of an abuse of process. All were extraordinary cases involving, for instance, a terror suspect captured and tortured overseas. Majzub, who represented the US at the hearing, offered no reasonable explanation from American authorities or from Cisco for what had happened. He said only that any mistakes were made in good faith; no one was being malicious or acting out of improper motives.
Nevertheless, Justice McKinnon said US prosecutors acted outrageously by having the executive arrested during his deposition in front of Cisco's lawyers, who could only have been delighted at his humiliation. (As Adekeye's company later put it, "The arrest took place in the presence of a US High Court Judge appointed Special Master, Mr. George Fisher, with Cisco's lawyers insisting on filming the entire arrest 'on the record.'")
"It speaks volumes for Cisco's duplicity," the judge fumed.
Justice McKinnon was flabbergasted that police had interrupted a judicial proceeding to nab Adekeye. "It is simply not done in a civilized jurisdiction that is bound by the rule of law," he said.
For centuries, going back at least to the 1500s, the custom and law in Britain and the nations that adopted its legal system was unequivocally clear: you don't arrest people while they are testifying. This was an egregious abuse of process and brought the administration of justice into disrepute, Justice Mackinnon concluded, adding it was obvious the RCMP didn't realize they were barging into a court hearing.
He suggested that Adekeye's ordeal was something out of Catch-22, the celebrated Joseph Heller novel. He also said Cisco had "the unmitigated gall" to try and use the criminal process to humiliate and force Adekeye to abandon the civil suit. At best, the allegations of criminal computer access, if real, should have been consolidated to a single charge carrying at most 15 years imprisonment.
Regardless, Justice McKinnon said, it was a perversion of justice to allow the criminal law to be used to resolve a trivial civil suit and it shouldn't be countenanced. If Canada had known the true facts, he maintained it would not have proceeded.
"Here we have a man who has no criminal record, who made every possible effort to comply with US immigration laws and procedures, but who dared to take on a multinational giant, rewarded with criminal charges that have been so grotesquely inflated as to make the average well-informed member of the public blanche at the audacity of it all," Justice McKinnon added.
The entire incident, in his opinion, was a planned and deliberate act by Cisco with the collusion of the US prosecutors to transform a minor civil complaint into a criminal charge requiring 500 years imprisonment. All the US had to do was let Adekeye into the country, Justice McKinnon said, but instead astoundingly misled Canada into launching expensive legal proceedings.
Back to Europe
"Almost nothing in the US attorney's letter was true," Adekeye's lawyer Sandford said afterwards. The prosecutors relied on innuendo and half-truths to dupe Justice Leask into issuing the arrest warrant and Justice Silverman into jailing Adekeye.
Sandford called the US conduct careless, cavalier, and Kafkaesque. She scoffed at the excuses. Cisco has a reputation for playing litigation hardball, she said, and she thought this was another example of that take-no-prisoners strategy. For instance, the company recently was ordered to pay nearly $75 million in a patent infringement fight during which the true patent owner complained, as one Israeli newspaper put it, that he was portrayed as "a greedy Jew who wanted to fill his pockets with money and take it to Israel."
"There is nothing wrong with aggression in litigation but there are rules and standards of fair play and they were not adhered to by this civil litigation," Sandford added. "This litigant wanted its pound of flesh."
Adekeye left Canada immediately after the verdict. He planned to spend time in London with his daughter and then rejoin his wife and two-year-old son in Switzerland. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Sandford said that Adekeye remains shaken by the ordeal and is considering seeking redress. Still, she added: "He's overjoyed it's over."
ACK!
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