July 17, 2007
A California state appeals court has reinstated a whistleblower suit that claimed Hewlett-Packard sold defective medical monitoring devices through its spin-off company, Agilent Technologies. A trial court had ruled that the relator, Robert Hindin, waited too long to file his suit. The appeals court reversed, saying the clock began running when Hindin notified the state of the fraud, not when he discovered it.
Hewlett-Packard and Agilent agreed to pay $7 million to the U.S. to settle similar claims in 2002. That whistleblower suit was also initiated by Hindin and eventually pursued by the U.S. government.
Bloomberg News ran a story on the court decision on July 13, 2007.