I have worked in large corporations for the last 43 years; one of them was IBM. The main thing I have learnt is, as Jeremiah says, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? – Jer 17:9.

Apparently there has been financial hanky-panky at the most senior levels of IBM:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – It isn’t often that big blue gets a black eye.

But Friday IBM , the leading U.S. technology firm known for its conservative management, found itself entangled in the largest ever hedge fund insider-trading scheme involving Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.

Robert Moffat, senior vice president and head of IBM’s systems and technology group was named as a defendant. Executives at leading chipmaker Intel Corp and management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. were also implicated.

At IBM, when the mighty fall, they are not put on display for public excoriation as an example to plebeians who might otherwise be tempted to follow in the footsteps of their putative betters: instead, they disappear. An attempt to look up Bob Moffat at IBM yields: The biography you tried to access does not exist. He has been cast into outer darkness.

Moffat had been with IBM since 1978, so he was a true blue IBMer; clearly he didn’t take the yearly pledge of obedience to IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines very seriously, though. In recent years his popularity with the rank and file at IBM has not been high since he was the architect of numerous purges and of moving North American jobs to India, Brazil, Argentina – anywhere where labour is cheap. IBM euphemistically calls this “Global Resourcing” – GR for short.

Unsurprisingly, when the news of Moffat’s arrest was made public, there were reports of cheering employees in IBM buildings all over North America. I confined myself to a smile.