Ken Khanh Nguyen is running for the Orange County Board of Education, Area 1. This man wants to run our children's schools in Orange County. But do voters really want him in office? Maybe they should read this investigative report from OC Politics Blog:
Who is Kenneth K. Nguyen (pictured above in Tahiti)? He is one of several candidates for the Orange County Board of Education, Area One, in the June primary. But what do we really know about him?
We know he serves on the Santa Ana Parks and Recreation Commission, which he listed as his occupation on his ballot statement. And he appears to have been the owner of a company called Keynet Corp., in Fountain Valley.
Keynet is no longer around, as a judge ruled in 2001, that Khanh “Kenneth” Nguyen, a Santa Ana resident, had to pay software vendor Novell Inc. $680,000 as punishment for a scheme to profit from pirated software, according to an article in Computer World. Here are a few excerpts from that article:
In 1997, Novell got complaints from its authorized resellers that Nguyen’s Keynet Corp. in Fountain Valley, Calif., was advertising Novell NetWare for less than what it cost authorized resellers to buy the software themselves.
According to Gage, Nguyen applied for and received 300 upgrades to NetWare licenses but used the same license number repeatedly and entered incorrect user information into the applications. The result was that he was able to buy the upgrades much more cheaply than the cost of the initial version of the software.
When Nguyen received the software, he used a heat gun to remove the upgrade labeling, then resold the software as new, with high margins but a relatively low cost to users, Novell said.
Novell posted about this on their own website, but they noted that the judgement against Nguyen was even larger:
Novell today announced that it has been awarded a judgment against Keynet Corporation of Fountain Valley, California, for more than $1.16 million. Novell brought the suit against Keynet for copyright and trademark infringement.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleged that Keynet, owned and primarily operated by Kenneth Nguyen, obtained and distributed more than 300 unauthorized NetWare® upgrade products.
Nguyen also appears to be the President and sole employee of the Little Saigon Foundation, which has no website, but you can read about it here. You can click here to watch a video of Nguyen talking about this organization. According to GuideStar.org, they are in debt.
I pulled Nguyen’s non-profit financial records. Click here to review his 2007 records. Click here to review his 2008 records. Click here to review his 2009 reviews.
