Amazon offered jobs to Pentagon employees to get cloud contract: Lawsuit

At least two Pentagon employees were offered jobs at Amazon.com Inc. while working on the Defense Department’s $10 billion cloud contract, a lawsuit filed by Oracle Corp. alleges.
The amended complaint, made public on Tuesday, claims Deap Ubhi, a former employee at a high-level Defense Department technology unit, helped design the cloud contract in a way that was favorable to Amazon even after receiving “significant” job and bonus offers from the e-commerce giant.

Oracle’s latest court action comes weeks after the Pentagon announced it had eliminated Oracle and International Business Machines Corp. from the bidding because they didn’t meet the minimum criteria, leaving Amazon and Microsoft Corp. as the last remaining competitors.
The Pentagon, which announced the Jedi competition in March of last year, doesn’t expect to award the contract before July 19.

Ubhi, who had worked at Amazon before joining the government, helped craft the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, procurement for weeks after accepting a job offer in October 2017 from Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud unit, according to the lawsuit. Ubhi then made up an “elaborate lie” about an Amazon offer to buy his startup company, Tablehero, when he “belatedly” recused himself from working on the contract, the lawsuit alleges. Readmore