Acer Sues IBM over Taiwanese Tax Dispute

Acer (News - Alert) Inc. has sued International Business Machines Corp. in a Taiwanese tax dispute stemming from a licensing agreement between the companies, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Acer claims IBM (News - Alert) has failed to reimburse it for tax refunds it had to repay to the Taiwanese government stemming from royalty payments to IBM between 2003 and 2009, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, The Journal reports.

Taiwanese tax authorities disallowed the refunds, according to The Journal.

IBM responds that it is not responsible for withholding taxes owed to Taiwan after April 2005, because of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo (News - Alert) Group Ltd., the lawsuit said, according to The Journal.

Acer made a royalty payment to IBM in August, minus the amount of withholding tax it owed Taiwanese tax authorities, according to the lawsuit. The amounts at issue weren't disclosed, The Journal reported.

The Journal also reported that IBM claims the deduction is a breach of the licensing agreement and has threatened to accelerate the payment of all remaining royalty payments it is owed under the pact or to terminate the licensing agreement, according to the lawsuit.

Acer is seeking a declaration from a U.S. judge that it had the right to deduct the tax payments, according to the lawsuit.

The Journal reported that IBM didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

In other Acer company news, TMCnet reported recently that Acer America has announced two new models in its Aspire AS8943G notebook line that now offer the ATI Mobility Radeon 5850 graphics processor with 2GB of dedicated video memory.

The Aspire Series is designed for creating multimedia content, watching movies or playing the latest PC games, according to the company.

The company says that, globally, Acer ranks No. 2 for total PCs and notebooks.