LOS ANGELES, July 22 (AFP) - He's been branded a corporate bully and hailed as technological visionary, but Microsoft Corp's plans for a record pay-out to shareholders has thrown the spotlight onto Bill Gates, the ultra-generous philanthropist.
The US software behemoth on Wednesday unveiled a plan to deliver an estimated 75 billion dollars to its shareholders over the next four years as it moves to slash the 56 billion dollar cash mountain it is sitting on.
As the Washington-state based firm's chairman and biggest shareholder, Gates -- already the world's richest man -- will receive 3.3 billion dollars of a special one-time dividend totalling 32 billion dollars.
But the 48-year-old billionaire immediately pledged he would donate the windfall to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a non-profit organisation he set up in 2000 to tackle health, education and literacy crises around the world.
"The pledge ... is recognition that our world, the nation and our region -- now more than ever -- can and should dramatically improve equity in health, education and access to information and human services for vulnerable families," Gates said.
The endowment would boost the assets of the foundation formed by Gates and his wife by 11 percent to 30 billion dollars, making it one of the largest such funds in the world.
Last year, it granted almost 1.2 billion dollars, mostly to global health and education causes in the developing world, bringing to 7.2 billion dollars the total pledged in the foundation's four-year history.
It gave the largest single grant to any single organisation shortly after its establishment -- 750 million dollars to a child vaccine research charity that aims to lower infant mortality in the third world.
In 2000, it promised 57 million dollars over five years to fight the spread of AIDS among young people in Africa and has pledged a total of 126.5 million dollars in grants for international research for an AIDS vaccine.
The Gates foundation has spent more than 600 million dollars on the combined fights against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and will spend around 478 million more by the end of 2005, forming a large chunk of the global spending on the illnesses.
The money has been earmarked for projects across the globe, in countries from the United States, to South Africa, India and Thailand.
"As Melinda and I have become more engaged in global health issues over the past decade, one thing has become clear: not enough is being done about the millions of preventable deaths each year from diseases like AIDS or malaria," Gates said in a speech earlier this year.
The foundation has also pledged a billion dollars to schools programmes and an African-American college fund, and runs a massive literacy programme under which it funds free Internet access in public libraries in economically deprived areas.
The Seattle-based foundation is co-chaired by Gates' father, William H. Gates Senior and Patty Stonesifer.
But while Gates and his foundation attract praise for their considerable magnanimity, he has also come under fire for his allegedly ruthless business tactics.
Those saw Microsoft, the firm Gates co-founded in the mid-1970s after dropping out of Harvard, dragged through a damaging, years-long court battle for allegedly trying to bully rivals in other software applications out of the market.
In late June, a US appeals court upheld the settlement of a massive and bitter anti-trust case against Microsoft by the federal government, all but concluding the long-running case on the software giant's monopoly abuse.
The settlement imposed no financial penalty, but it forced the software giant to disclose more technical information and barred anti-competitive agreements on Microsoft products.
In March, the world's biggest software maker was fined a record 497 million euros (611 million dollars) by the European Union for similar alleged anti-trust violations.
The company's returns to shareholders announced Wednesday come after it has settled most of its legal issues, including an appeals court affirmation of its anti-trust settlement with the US government and several class-action suits in US courts.