Leo Apotheker is starting to look like one of the most disaster-prone CEOs in recent Silicon Valley history, after his brief but shambolic tenure at HP..<\/p>\n
Now, another of his overpriced and ill-judged ventures – the acquisition of UK-based Autonomy<\/em><\/strong> – has taken an ugly turn, with the revelation that the deal may have been tainted by gross financial misrepresentation: Of course, Apotheker has now claimed that he was completely unaware of any of this, at the time: It would appear that – accusations of potentially illegal behaviour aside – the ‘due diligence’ may not have been sufficiently thorough, and may have been prejudiced by a strong desire to ‘see the deal through’ despite any misgivings..\u00a0\u00a0 After all, the price HP paid was thought at the time to be ludicrously high..<\/p>\n After all, lest we forget, this is the same CEO who killed off HP’s promising foray into the growing Tablet market – the HP TouchPad – two months after the product had been launched, and after significant investments had already been made, and the company was forced to sell them off at humiliatingly bargain-basement prices.. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I worked for HP for over 18 years – in the UK and California, before being laid off as a consequence of the ‘merger’ with Compaq..<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a9 Robert Gadsdon, 2012<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leo Apotheker is starting to look like one of the most disaster-prone CEOs in recent Silicon Valley history, after his brief but shambolic tenure at HP.. Now, another of his overpriced and ill-judged ventures – the acquisition of UK-based Autonomy – has taken an ugly turn, with the revelation that the deal may have been tainted by …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[116,113,111,112,115,110,114],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QtnY-1j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rhgtechnology.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/finance\/newsbysector\/mediatechnologyandtelecoms\/electronics\/9690537\/HP-accuses-Autonomy-of-accounting-improprieties.html<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/digits\/2012\/11\/20\/leo-apotheker-due-diligence-of-autonomy-was-meticulous\/<\/a><\/p>\n
\nAnd, this is the CEO who summarily announced that HP was quitting the PC business, and then later retracted his statement, by which time the damage had already been done…<\/p>\n