Michael J. de la Merced and Quentin Hardy, for the Times’ DealBook:

The charge essentially wiped out its profit.

The headline should say “outright misrepresentations,” not “accounting improprieties,” because the former is far more serious than the latter, and both are true.

HP hired Deloitte to review Autonomy’s books during the acquisition’s due diligence phase. Then they hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s audit of Autonomy. Only after a former Autonomy employee tipped them off did they hire PricewaterhouseCoopers, who discovered Autonomy sold hardware at a loss, despite calling itself a successful software-only company.

Whoops. And it gets worse.

Go read it for yourself. I can’t take any more of this crap.

Michael J. De La Merced and Neil Gough, in The New York Times:

In a statement on Monday, SoftBank, a big Japanese telecommunications company, said it would pay $8 billion to buy newly issued Sprint stock worth about $5.25 a share. It will then pay $12.1 billion to buy existing stock from other investors at $7.30 a share, a premium to current levels.

This could be a very big deal. Sprint just became a strong third place again to Verizon and AT&T.