I have a hard time believing this story, who can afford to give back 10 months of salary? According to the story the employee accepted to "pay the fine" so that

I have a hard time believing this story, who can afford to give back 10 months of salary? According to the story the employee accepted to "pay the fine" so that "it wouldn’t hurt his career badly", in my experience virtually no company has the power to hurt a developers' career, it would require a significant amount of fraud from the employee's to do that.