After deliberately deceiving consumers in Australia and after being fined $3m dollars by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission Hewlett Packard has moved to shake up their global board.
What is not known is whether Australian management being their recent warranty scam have been sacked or simply reprimanded.
Already under fire for its past performance, Hewlett-Packard said overnight that it has appointed three new directors, increasing its board from nine to 12 members.
The new directors are Robert “Dob” Bennett, former president and CEO of Liberty Media Corporation; Raymond Ozzie, former chief software architect of Microsoft and founder of Talko; and James Skinner, former CEO of McDonald’s and Walgreen’s current chairman.
The appointments are effective immediately, according to HP, which said it is still searching for additional directors and a permanent non-executive chairman.
Ralph Whitworth was named interim chairman in April, after Ray Lane gave up that post, but remained an HP director, amid criticism over the board’s stewardship of the storied Palo Alto Company. Two other board members – John Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson – also resigned at the time.
The biggest investor concern was HP’s $11 billion purchase of British software company Autonomy in 2011, a deal HP later wrote off for about $8.8 billion because it said had been misled about Autonomy’s value.
“In April, we made a pledge to recruit the very best, most talented leaders to HP’s already outstanding board,” Whitworth said in a company statement announcing the three new directors. “Dob, Ray and Jim bring tremendous capital allocation, technological, operational and leadership expertise and experience to the table.”
In Australia local management are not returning calls instead they are hiding behind motherhood press statements despite the seriousness of their actions in deceiving consumers over their warranty rights relating to PC’s.
