An okay bunch of guesses, but not quite right.
In a nutshell:
- An FE called Philips legal saying that one of his customers was taking bribes to buy Siemens. A corporate lawyer and the FE talked until the lawyer understood how the whole thing worked. The buy was padded by $70,000 to $100,000. This was a state hospital. The guy who made the final decision was given the $70,000. Pretty standard stuff. Sometimes the salesman will keep some himself.
- Philips told Siemens, who was just coming out of that worldwide SOX judgement, to back off. Then Philips took over all future sales to that state. Millions of $$$ in of sales later, the state built a new hospital and every single thing in the place was Philips, everything.
The FE knew what had happened and what was going on. He had been the one to explain it to legal. And every equipment sale to the state from that day on had been Philips, all over the state. He sent the FDA and the state AG a letter.
The FDA shut down Cleveland and began an audit. Philips assigned KC the job of interfacing with the FDA. That same FE had conversations with KC, who then knew where to look and for what. Being honest, KC could not sit and watch the crimes discovered. KC quit Philips, and hired on with the FDA investigating Philips.
The SOX case with Siemens had proven that a massive fine is never paid. Lawyers can spend loads of company money fighting to not pay the fine. Siemens was fined several billion $$$. The FDA learned lessons. What they did was to keep Cleveland shut down until, according to past sales records, Philips was prevented from earning about 1 billion $$$. They couldn't even upgrade their existing CTs to include dose monitoring, which became mandatory during the shutdown. That hurt Philips even worse, as customers bought GE or Siemens to replace Philips systems without dose monitoring.
But now Philips is open in Cleveland again. They can sell Nuclear Medicine, CT and refurbished again. I think. Not so sure if NM wasn't just dropped, and can't tell if refurbished is running again or not.
I guess Philips was bribing more than a few customers to buy their product. The way things were done, which was cheaper for the FDA than going to court, the state buyers may never have been held accountable for taking the bribes.