Judge nixes HP deal for director amnesty after $8.8bn Autonomy snafu HP's plan to defend its directors in the Autonomy scandal – and present a united front against the Brit business's former execs and their auditors – has been thrown into doubt by a US judge. Last month HP announced a settlement with lawyers representing its own shareholders, who had brought legal action against HP: the …
You [redacted] up big time. You said Yes to Autonomy. If you can't do your due diligence properly then frankly, your top brass deserve every kicking they will get.
You could have walked away but no, the 'shopping gene' (sorry to be sexist but women seem to have it more than men) kicked in and... 'where do I sign?'.
Actually, the HP board need to be sacked en-masse. Ever since the Takeover of Compaq-DEC they have been messing around with the company. There are other acquisitions almost as bad as Autonomy that have dragged the once great company downhill ever since.
This is rather sad because I know a few long term HP staffers who just upped and quit at the frustration with getting anything done. I didn't have to worry about that, as soon at the HP-Compaq deal was approved my whole department was axed despite us making 50%+++ margins on everything we did. We didn't fit in their 'model' so we had to go.
Anon because a few hardy souls I worked with are still there and I don't want to risk their jobs for being associated with me. A certain level of HP managers seem to be really vindictive these days. Not a happy place to work by all accounts.
You said Yes to Autonomy. If you can't do your due diligence properly then frankly, your top brass deserve every kicking they will get.
Wel, in fairness, the board should be kicked for somehow magically avoiding to question their auditors - surely it was their job to unearth tiny little problems like the ones alleged to reside in Autonomy? It seems Delinquent & Louche did the traditional consulting approach of using juniors for a job (at least, that's what it looks like to me) and them chickens are homebound to roost with a vengeance, with a judge now preventing them from boarding up the coop (I don't think I can butcher the expression any further).
It find it absolutely fascinating that the HP board has not expressed even the smallest inclination to demand answers from Deloitte & Touche so I cannot help but wonder what Deloitte & Touche have on them...
It find it absolutely fascinating that the HP board has not expressed even the smallest inclination to demand answers from Deloitte & Touche so I cannot help but wonder what Deloitte & Touche have on them...
I must wonder, is there grounds for criminal charges for breach of fiduciary duty that could be filed against HP's manglement and BoD??
The most appropriate icon for HP's manglement and BoD. ------------------------------------------->
Our friend Leo Apotheker takes the credit/debit ( which way you read it) for doing the deal with Autonomy, let's include that chap. I believe Meg said that the deal was already too far gone to pull out of. Any that 's my 2 cents. Its doesn't change the outcome HP is at fault.
That would work, except Meg Whitman was on the board at the time of the deal. You can't make $10bn purchases without board approval. The board are financially and legally responsible for oversight of the business and its executives, on behalf of the shareholders. If it wasn't a good deal, she still signed it.
Not actually. Same gene differently enabled. Women get called out for it because they do it more often, but usually for less expensive items. Men do it less often, but more than compensate with the size of their purchases. With a purchase this size, definitely the male shopping gene at work.
On the HP issue, the once great company is dead. Only the zombie body remains, and like a zombie they keep ravaging new towns always looking for "Brains!"
People forget Meg Whitman was on her second major unplanned write-down. One multi-billion dollar write-down seems careless. Two looks like rank incompetence and a sacking offence. In this context facing an impossible to deliver message in the annual analysts call she casts accusations at Autonomy, and yet doesn't back them up with a shred of evidence. The story becomes a giant distraction from the fact of a second, politically "impossible" to manage write down.
Over time it emerges the legal case against Autonomy is a fraction of the actual write-down. And it takes HP so much time much time to produce the case it rather appears they may be attempting to cook up a legal case after the event - surely if you are accusing a company and it's executives of illegal activity you do so only if you already have actual evidence for your accusation? So it has turned out Whitman did achieve the impossible, but in wholly the wrong way as a CEO. She successfully distracted the press from her rank incompetence. With an army of accountants working to her direction she has only been able to produce a case amounting to a small fraction of the write-down. More damning HP's own accountants have not to signed off on the case HP have produced. It rather appears as though the accountants themselves don't see it as watertight. The prima-facial evidence is that Whitman produced this lawsuit as a distraction from her own rank incompetence.
The real story here is how a CEO has managed to so successfully manipulate the media and avoid being hauled over the coals as she should be for the write down HP themselves are no longer in the main attributing to illegal activity (in the original press release on the matter they were making bold sweeping statements).
Sure. HP can go ahead with the court case against ex Autonomy execs. They may even truly believe it. But HP's incompetence is a rather different matter. Whitman should be sacked now.
As above - why did Whitman not go after Deloitte & Touche?
What do they know that the shareholders are as yet unaware of? There's no other reason I can come up with for being friendly to the auditors (but I haven't had coffee yet).
If I had HP shares instead of only their sauce* I'd sell, because it gives me the impression there is more to come, and I don't like problems that are suppressed and left untouched. As I said, it's an impression, but things just don't seem to add up and until they do I would consider HP unsafe.
* It's a joke. All of it, actually.
I am interested to know what portion of blame is to be attached to the different parties. I have little doubt that an element of smoke and mirrors was in Autonomy's accounts; the question is whether they amounted to attaching 'ambitious' (but legally defensible) values to various assets, or whether it was a devilish fraud on the level of Enron. If it is the former, HP and Meg deserve to go to fiery hell for being taken for a pair of mugs.
"If it is the former, HP and Meg deserve to go to fiery hell for being taken for a pair of mugs."
Agree completely, but also, if the case is dismissed, even more deserve to go to fiery hell for trying to stripe-up Mike Lynch. It would mean she quite literally was prepared to send someone to prison to save her job. If Mike Lynch sold her a pup photo presented it well, and it turned out Autonomy was actually the pup grown into an ugly old dog, it is perfectly fair and can be argued he is simply a salesman making a one off sale where he doesn't care about maintaining future relations and did a good job for Autonomy shareholders. If he personally directed a co-ordinated effort to deceive and mis-categorise accounts, he deserves to be punished (though the auditors should of course, have picked this up during due diligence). However there would have to be evidence he co-ordinated an effort to deceive. You can't hold a CEO liable for any minor fraud that might be uncovered as in a company above a certain size, you are always going to have bad actors somewhere (most usually in the form of a rogue salesman or someone cheating on their expenses) that will mean there has been some accounting activity that can be considered fraudulent.
At the moment buying any HP product for critical services looks like a stupid idea.
When this shit hit the fan, my forward thinking boss put HP on the do not buy list, as she expected HP to disappear go down in flames; and she didn't want unsupported kit at our company. Can't blame her for that.
What a great shame that such a innovating company has come to this. They did a full range of test equipment, much ahead of the game. What happened to the 'shed' ?
Back in the early 70s a speaker company I worked for had one of their computers (used in the Polaris subs I think ) and FFT box. First company to do speaker testing using FFT. HP were very helpful.
Plus their HP35. THE first proper scientific calculator. RPN - enter and the answer comes FORTH - pun intended.
Nostalgia.
...that at $10.7B HP was already paying over $4B more than anybody else thought Autonomy was worth. Even the $8.8B writedown is more than anybody else would have paid for Autonomy in total. So even if Autonomy's books turn out to be completely clean, HP *still* grossly overpaid for it.
A good case can be made that this whole lawsuit is a smokescreen so that they can bury the big writedown due to overpaying along with the much smaller writedown for whatever misrepresentations there might allegedly have been.
Initially I was rather encouraged by the fact that HP is not going to be able to make a backroom deal and quietly bury as much of this mess it can. I like the thought that things will be said in court, publicly, instead of being hushed up.
But then it hit me and I realized that it won't make a shred of difference anyway. As has been said in this very thread, Meg has already botched a billion dollar acquisition, now she's responsible for two of them. Once upon a time, failing anything with a billion dollar price tag on it was followed by bowing out and leaving the job to someone else. Nowadays, the high-flyers make colossal mistakes and are faced with barely a threat, while they throw out the small fry in droves as soon as someone forgot the correct amount of postage, or something else equally trivial.
And it's not just HP, it's the entire corporate culture of today. Ballmer lead by example here. During his tenure there were many failures, some quite expensive, yet he kept the helm and bowed out only when he decided to. In other times, recognizing Microsoft's failure to comprehend the importance of the Internet would already have been his ticket out. Of course, it's a bit more difficult to oust a major shareholder, I recognize that, but that's the whole point. If Ballmer stayed so long despite an ever-increasing string of (expensive) failures, it is precisely because he was a major shareholder.
Meg is not. So why is she still in place ? How is it that she was allowed to throw almost 9 billion away ? Where is her acknowledgement of responsibility ?
The higher the pay, the more exacting the requirement of performance. That is how it should be. When you're being paid a million dollars a month, the result should be no less than perfection.
It clearly has not been.
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