- Yahoo CIO Mike Kail.
Netflix Inc.NFLX -2.10% sued its former vice president of IT operations Mike Kail, Monday, alleging that he accepted kickbacks from vendors. Mr. Kail currently is the chief information officer of Yahoo Inc.YHOO -0.21%
In the lawsuit, Netflix accused Mr. Kail of fraud, breach of fiduciary duties and other improper actions. Mr. Kail didn’t respond to a request for comment. A Netflix spokesman said the company would not comment on pending litigation. Yahoo declined to comment. News of the lawsuit was first reported by Re/code.
In the lawsuit filed in California Superior Court, Santa Clara County, Netflix said it paid two IT service companies, VistaraIT Inc. and NetEnrich Inc., a total of $3.7 million from 2012 until Mr. Kail’s departure in August 2014. Netflix alleges that he accepted commissions of 12% to 15% of the monthly fees Netflix paid to the companies. “Netflix’s investigation also revealed that, on information and belief, Kail may have received other benefits from companies that contracted with Netflix, including but not limited to, stock, gift certificates, and cash,” Netflix said in the complaint.
“I want to bring some of the tech cred back to Yahoo, which has probably been a bit stale over the past few years,” Mr. Kail told CIO Journal in an interview in August. He said he wanted to speed up the rollout of new data-center infrastructure.
While he was at Netflix, Mr. Kail set the company on a path to shift all of its corporate IT to software-as-a-service and to the public cloud, according to a to a 2014 presentation. In November, he joined the board of IT-as-a-service firm ElasticBox as a strategic adviser to help the IT-as-a-service company become “market ready” sooner.
