Larry Ellison Defends Mark Hurd

The CEO of Oracle writes the NYT: “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”

Mr Hurd resigned from the world’s largest maker of personal computers on Friday night after an internal investigation, sparked by sexual harassment allegations from former HP contractor Jodie Fisher. The investigation found him not to have breached any harassment guidelines but to have broken the company’s business standards conduct after allegedly falsifying expenses claims to cover up his friendship with Ms Fisher.
Mr Ellison claimed HP’s board voted 6-4 in favour of going public with Ms Fisher’s claims. “In losing Mark Hurd, the HP board failed to act in the best interest of HP’s employees, shareholders, customers and partners,” he continued. “Publishing known false sexual harassment claims is not good corporate governance; it’s cowardly corporate political correctness.”
Ms Fisher said in her own statement that she did not have an “intimate sexual relationship” with Mr Hurd and that the pair have settled her claim privately.
Mr Ellison also said that his friend did not commit expense fraud, saying such claims were “not credible” and showed the “HP board desperately grasping at straw in trying to publicly explain the unexplainable”.

Posted by on August 11th, 2010 at 8:59 am


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