Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001 because of a fraud engineered by the management. The company was based in Ypres, Flanders, in what was later called Flanders Language Valley (mimicking the Silicon Valley). History Lernout & Hauspie was founded in 1987 by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. After a difficult start, it quickly grew, and, in 1995, it went public on NASDAQ (LHSP), and was also quoted on the now-defunct Brussels-based EASDAQ exchange. Its headquarters were in Ypres, Belgium, and in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. At its peak, Lernout & Hauspie had a market capitalization of almost US$10 billion. Flanders played an important role in investing in the company and the surrounding Flanders Language Valley. It acquired a number of its smaller competitors, including text-to-speech developer Berkeley Speech Technologies, in 1996. In 1998 it acquired Globalink, Inc., a provider of advanced translation software products and professional translation services. During March–April 2000, Lernout & Hauspie acquired Dictaphone for nearly US$1 billion, then acquired Dragon Systems shortly thereafter. Lernout & Hauspie also acquired PowerScribe, a voice recognition system for Radiology. This system was started by a company called Articulate Systems, and sold and supported by a company called The MRC Group (later Fonix, then SpeechFX) before becoming part of L&H. For some time, Lernout & Hauspie was dogged by rumours of financial impropriety, and in early 1999 the Wall Street Journal ran allegations in its Heard on the Street column by Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Smithson that earnings had been overstated. Further investigation by WSJ staffer Jesse Eisinger led to the revelation on 8 August 2000 of a major financial scandal involving fictitious transactions in Korea and improper accounting methodologies elsewhere. In April 2001, founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, as well as former CEO Gaston Bastiaens, were arrested in what is considered one of the largest corporate scandals in history prior to Enron. After having struggled for a year, Lernout & Hauspie finally went bankrupt on 25 October 2001 following the release of Windows XP. Many people, especially in West Flanders, were blinded by the company's success and lost large sums of money on Lernout & Hauspie stock. The Flanders regional government became a major Lernout & Hauspie investor through a venture capital arm. During one of Lernout & Hauspie's cash shortages,