Hewlett-Packard's (HP) chairwoman ordered monitoring of its directors' phones to determine the source of news leaks, prompting a furor in which one director quit and another rebuffed efforts to oust him, the company said on Tuesday.
The dispute is to be laid out in documents that HP was to file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) yesterday.
The concern over leaks began in the months preceding Carly Fiorina's ouster as chief executive last year, the company said.
But the confrontation within the board unfolded this year after an internal report identified George Keyworth II, Hewlett-Packard's longest-serving director, as a source of disclosures.
The company said the report was based on monitoring of board members' calls from home phones and cellphones in January, an effort authorized by Patricia Dunn, the chairwoman.
BOARDROOM DISPUTE
When the report was presented at its meeting in May, the board asked Keyworth to resign, but he refused, saying he had been elected by the shareholders, a company spokesman said.
The company also said that the attempt to oust Keyworth had prompted Thomas Perkins, the founder of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to resign.
A company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said that because Perkins did not say that he was resigning out of disagreement with the board, the company did not disclose the events relating to the investigation when it reported his resignation to the SEC.
"He's changed his mind," the spokesman said of Perkins, and because he has a dispute with the company, that prompted a further disclosure to the SEC.
Hewlett-Packard, which is expected to hold board elections in March, said Keyworth would not be renominated for his seat.
Keyworth and Perkins did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening.
The HP board began an investigation into news leaks after forcing Fiorina to resign in February last year.
AUTHORIZATION
The board dispute was reported on Tuesday in an article on Newsweek's Web site by David Kaplan, who is writing a book about a yacht that Perkins recently had built.
The article said Dunn, who was named chairwoman after Fiorina's ouster, had authorized a team of independent electronic-security experts to monitor the phone communications of the 10 other directors.
HP said its legal counsel had advised her that the surveillance was legal and proper.
The company said that it began the investigation last year after news reports quoted directors about dissatisfaction with Fiorina's management.
But the Wall Street Journal's Web site reported on Tuesday evening that it was a report last January on the CNET Web site about an off-site management meeting that provoked Dunn's ire.
The Newsweek article said that Perkins had provided documents to the SEC revealing how the investigation was conducted and that he had not been allowed to review and approve the SEC filing the company made in May regarding his resignation.
The article said Perkins had asked other government agencies to investigate the surveillance of HP directors.
An Emirates flight from Dubai arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday afternoon, the first service of the airline since the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Saturday. Flight EK366 took off from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 3:51am yesterday and landed at 4:02pm before taxiing to the airport’s D6 gate at Terminal 2 at 4:08pm, data from the airport and FlightAware, a global flight tracking site, showed. Of the 501 passengers on the flight, 275 were Taiwanese, including 96 group tour travelers, the data showed. Tourism Administration Deputy Director-General Huang He-ting (黃荷婷) greeted Taiwanese passengers at the airport and
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
STRAIT OF HORMUZ: In the case of a prolonged blockade by Iran, Taiwan would look to sources of LNG outside the Middle East, including Australia and the US Taiwan would not have to ration power due to a shortage of natural gas, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday, after reports that the Strait of Hormuz was closed amid the conflict in the Middle East. The government has secured liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies for this month and contingency measures are in place if the conflict extends into next month, Kung told lawmakers. Saying that 25 percent of Taiwan’s natural gas supplies are from Qatar, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) asked about the situation in light of the conflict. There would be “no problems” with
RSS