Autonomy trial: Meg Whitman ‘ready to throw Leo under bus’ for failed merger
Former HP chief executive Meg Whitman was prepared to throw her predecessor “under the bus“ and blame him for the tech giant’s failed £8.4bn acquisition of Autonomy, a court heard yesterday.
In an email to HP’s head of communications in 2012 Whitman said she was “happy to throw Leo under the bus in a tit for tat”.
Read more: HP not suing Autonomy US exec ‘to go after Mike Lyunch fraud trial’
The email followed a news report in which ex-HP chief executive Leo Apotheker blamed the company’s board for the acquisition.
Her email, read out to the court yesterday, was sent a month after HP announced a huge writedown on the deal which had closed a year earlier.
The deal is at the centre of the biggest civil fraud trial in UK history.
In the Autonomy trial underwa,y HP is suing British businessman Mike Lynch, who was the founder and chief executive of Autonomy, for $5.1bn.
The tech firm claims Lynch and finance chief Sushovan Hussain falsely inflated the software firm’s revenue ahead of the sale.
Giving evidence in court yesterday Whitman said: “I felt like he [Apotheker] was trying to throw the board under the bus and it was in a moment of anger over what had happened here and I shouldn’t have said it.”
Robert Miles QC, for Lynch, said: “This is what you then did to Dr Lynch.”
“That was not the case,” Whitman added.
Lynch has accused HP of treating Autonomy like its “unwanted stepchild”, saying the board lost its nerve over the acquisition.
Whitman told the High Court that she refocused HP on its core hardware business to reassure the market following an announcement of the Autonomy acquisition and a proposal to spin off the company’s PC business, which sparked a share price plunge.
“There is no question I was securing our hardware business…I didn’t say we were not going to do anything with software but I wanted to make sure the customers and the markets knew we were not going to walk away from our bread and butter,” she said.
The court also heard that Whitman played country music in executive committee meetings and read out praise she had received from staff.
Read more: Mike Lynch blames HP for ‘botched’ Autonomy merger
Whitman denied reading out complementary messages but admitted she had once played “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers during in a meeting to “get a message across”.
The trial continues.