San Francisco: Hewlett-Packard Co on Monday defended new CEO Leo Apotheker from the latest barrage of criticism, and accused his predecessor Mark Hurd for the first time of repeatedly lying to the board.
HP's newly aggressive stance could further inflame the company's already testy relationship with partner and rival Oracle Corp which hired Hurd as co-president in September after he left HP.
HP was responding to widely read New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who suggested that former SAP AG boss Apotheker had known about the theft of software that took place at a SAP subsidiary called TomorrowNow, but had initially done nothing about it.
Oracle has accused SAP — through TomorrowNow — of gaining unauthorised access to its customer support website, allowing SAP to copy thousands of Oracle software products and other confidential material. SAP has accepted liability for copyright infringement in the lawsuit, set to go to trial in November.
"The facts are: TomorrowNow was never under Apotheker's supervision," incoming HP Chairman Ray Lane said in a letter to the newspaper.
"Oracle has been litigating this case for years and has never offered any evidence that Apotheker was involved." Nocera also suggested Hurd was brought down by "minor expense account shenanigans."
