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.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B