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By Jo Best, 24 November 2004 13:05

NEWS When Microsoft settled its antitrust battle with the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) earlier this year, one of the CCIA's top execs and an outspoken critic of Microsoft was paid nearly $10m.

According to the documents seen by the Financial Times, Ed Black, president of the CCIA, took half of the $19.75m payment Microsoft made to the association. The payment was approved by the board of the CCIA, the paper said.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said that while the company had made the payment to the association, it had not had any part in saying how the money was distributed after it was paid.

"It was of course up to the CCIA Board to decide how to use the money it received from us and we had no involvement at all in that process," she said.

However, when Microsoft and the CCIA announced the settlement, the Redmond behemoth seems to have intended the cash for lawyer's pockets, not Black's. The spokeswoman said: "Microsoft agreed to make a payment to CCIA as an organisation as reimbursement for certain legal and related expenditures that it had incurred."

Ed Black could not immediately be reached for comment.

As part of the settlement, the CCIA agreed to drop its antitrust suit against Microsoft, which alleged that Windows XP was anticompetitive. It also agreed to drop out of acting for the European Commission in its antitrust case against the software maker, which ruled that Microsoft should pay €497m and sell a version of Windows without its media player software bundled in.

The EU also recently lost another of its antitrust backers when Novell withdrew its support after settling with Redmond for $536m.