Whilst based in Scotland, I deal a lot with US companies. I have gentleman's agreements with companies in the US that have run for years. A US lawyer advised me that if I reminded the other side of our agreement once a year, then it was renewed. Whether it is or not is immaterial: gentlemen keep their agreements. Never had a problem with those companies, nor they with me. They are not good business practice, but are common.

The dispute Halcyon claim they have with Barry Miller is not as unusual as it may seem. I have seen it in a few companies, and experienced it myself.

Four years ago, I had a group of employees run their own business as contractors for Siemens, while working as full time staff for me. They stole some stuff and also did me about $500k of damage in lost time. Quite funny really: our IT saw unusual traffic, so I went with the only one we could identify to his PC and called up Recent Documents, and when this confirmed things, I suspended him until we could organise a disciplinary meeting, took out his disk drive for safekeeping, and escorted him off the premises.

The day before the disciplinary hearing, I put the disk back in his machine and while I had a directory open, files were vanishing before my eyes! The others in his consortium were deleting files as soon as they saw his machine on line! This allowed me to find all the others: I immediately suspended the lot.

At the disciplinary meeting, each admitted it - given the evidence on the disks they had not a leg to stand on. They agreed to return stuff they stole. I fired them and told Siemens that if I got any more of this, I would do a civil claim for the profits from the product line they developed with my staff as in law I owned the design rights. Someone acting for Siemens had deliberately recruited my staff in this way.

These circumstances have none of the mitigating factors of Barry Miller's case.

Siemens still keep trying to poach my staff, even now, but our current team are really good and honest people so no problem. Due to the theft aspect, if I had contacted the police, the families of those that did this would have had a hard 5 years, and instead of those guys running their own business now, employing 15, they would be trying to piece together their lives. They know it, and recently two of them did me a nice favour.

Now it is reported Halcyon are starting a libel action against Barry. How on earth can Barry defend himself from where he is? The best signal for justice, would be for Barry to raise a counterlibel action and win, but justice and courts, from what I have seen, have no relationship with each other. Dishonesty and courts seem to have a close bond: those that use courts are, in my experience, the dishonest people you do not want to have any dealings with.

Pity we have this behaviour in what is really a tiny industry, where most companies struggle just to make a steady living and very few get rich. Most work for the passion of diving. Until we have more with bigger minds then it will stay a network of cottage industry.

Parallels with the misuse of the law by Scientologists and Halcyon have got even closer. Always said DIR was a religion. Expect to get lots of Red Blobs for my posts on this thread, as you cannot reason with some.

I won't comment any more on this. Just is a very sad reflection on the way elements in the industry are going.

Alex