justen

First, boardroom eavesdropping? Now corporate espionage? Just when you had almost forgotten about the mess that was Mark Hurd’s first year at HP, we now find out that a serious lack of integrity and accountability wasn’t limited to HP’s directors… Apparently, its officers were in on the game as well. From the Wall Street Journal:

“[Atul Malhotra,] a former Hewlett-Packard Co. vice president has been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly passing a confidential email from his previous employer, International Business Machines Corp., to senior H-P executives.”

It was almost two years ago that the media storm from the boardroom spying scandal began surrounding HP. Then-chairman Patricia Dunn ultimately resigned in the wake of the ensuing scrutiny, but Mr. Hurd escaped relatively unscathed by feigning ignorance of what was going on at his company. He even managed to snag Ms. Dunn’s chairman title for himself, in what was one of the more unusual corporate governance ironies in recent memory… I wrote at that time:

Mr. Hurd should [resign]. Why? He says he knows the internal memorandums were sent to him, but he says that he didn’t read them. It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t read those memos, but if he truly didn’t, he had a responsibility, and an accountability, to make sure the investigation was progressing, and progressing appropriately. He didn’t. It is especially unusual that Mr. Hurd has now assumed the chairmanship, as well. At the end of the day, directors and officers of America’s businesses and organizations must adhere to high standards, and they must take responsibility when they fall short of those standards.

How many serious breaches of compliance does it take before a chief executive officer is held accountable for their company’s actions? Let’s look at HP… The first one felled a chairman. Here we are at take two…