Slashdot Mirror
HP Faces Expanded Civil Lawsuit in Spying Case
narramissic writes "ITworld is reporting that a shareholder lawsuit against HP for pretexting has been expanded to include charges of insider stock trading. On top of everything else, eight executives implicated in the spying ring also participated in the sale of 1.7 million shares of the company. " From the article: "An amended complaint filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of California for Santa Clara County accuses HP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd and seven other company executives of selling $41.3 million worth of HP stock at 'inflated prices' shortly before the company revealed that its investigators had used questionable and possibly illegal techniques to gain access to personal records such as phone call logs."
Can anyone explain to those who haven't been following this what this 'spying' story was all about?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The Lawyers.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This sounds pretty bad, until you look at the insider trading history for HP. It appears that, with the exception of Mark Hurd, most insider trades were fairly normal for the officers involved. It's not surprising that Mark Hurd was selling 200,000 shares during this timeframe, as 1/2 were exercising an option and the other half was only ~15,000 shares above his prior disposition in April.
Unless there really was insider trading (and someone comes forward to prove it), I imagine HP will get out of this suit pretty easily.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
Shut up and go away. No one wants you here anyway.
As a former HP contractor who watched a once great company get dragged through the mud and watched hundreds of dedicated rank and file employees fall to the wayside on the deathmarch to the bottom line I can only say:
It's about time that these arrogant jerks were accountable to someone other than the wall street analysts and to something other than the allmighty dollar.
I was there from the time that Lew Platt's departure brought about the HP-Agilent split and Carly's reign of terror all the way through the Comapq HP merger and the Mark Hurd 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' era.
HP employees are still among the worlds most talented and dedicated, but it's getting harder when the best and brightest are forced in to early retirement or have to help in the offshoring of their own jobs -I had to do that, and though I did my best it was an absolute disaster. But since they are currently beating Dell at whatever cost management has little incentive to do things any differently.
-What's the speed of dark?
Lying is lying.
What is this bullshit doublespeak term "pretexting?" So when a regular person does it it's called "fraud" or "lying", but when corporate executives do it it's called "pretexting"? It kind of makes it sound like some technicality, "oh, they were only pretexting, it's not like they were committing fraud".
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I realize that one does not necessarily need to profit from or avoid losses to be guilty of insider trading but I have to imagine it really makes it harder to prove it when the stock price goes in the wrong direction after said trading. Is there any evidence of insider trading? What damage are the shareholders looking to recover? The stock has gained 10% or more since the 1st of sept...
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Lying isn't often a crime, and it isn't even always unethical. I lie to my wife when she asks how she looks. I lie to slashdoters by telling them I have a wife.
Obtaining private information on false pretext on the other hand is a crime. Pretexting, while a somewhat silly word, is a far more accurate and descriptive term than lying and is definately preferable to it. It does not dimminish the seriousness of what they did, it emphasises it. Even if you were to pick a more commonly used word, there are better ones than lying - like spying, or violating employee's privacy, both of which have been used in mainstream articles. This slashdot meme that they are playing down the seriousness of the offense by calling it by it's actuall name is stupid.
Unless there really was insider trading
The law is supposed to be very clear on this. If they used confidential information as the reason the stock is manipulated, then they are breaking the law.
Now, does the State have enough hard evidence to prove this? It appears they have enough to at least try.
The thing that disappoints me most is the shock that HP isn't such a fine corporate citizen. To borrow a phrase, HP is eating their seed corn. It's reasonable to assume the probability that other publicly traded american corporations are doing the same is very high.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
September 8th: HP General Counsel Tending to Execs' Stock Sales
A bit of disclouse here - I'm an HP guy. So I could be accused of bias when I say this is bullshit. But here goes:
.. this rant dedicated to anyone that has really been fucked over by a large company but couldn't even get a response to their complaint, let alone get some of their top people sacked ..
The share price has gone up since the scandal. It barely blinked while it was going on. What fucking idiot of a shareholder sues a company for "insider trading" when the share price is still going up?
But wait, at the time the trades were made, the price had been inflated! You know they're inflated, because they had been going up every single month for 18 months straight! Erm, again, not too sure why a shareholder (as compared to an opportunistic "law suits are a valid business model" asshat) would be worried about a guy delivering a 180% improvement in share price, more or less constantly delivered over his entire time in the CEO position.
You know what, I don't care if not only did these execs genuinely believe the share price would plummet, but were also thinking about coming round to my house to shot my dog and steal my hubcaps. Partly this is because I don't have a dog. Mainly though it's because lawsuits by people who haven't actually been harmed are a plague upon society.
And to all those bitching about HP's pretexting, one law for the rich and the corporations, one for the rest of us, etc - grow up. Yes, it's unethical. Yes, it should be illegal (I say "should" because, well, frankly I suspect this will become a legal test case where at best HP gets a slap on the wrist in order to set a legal precedent). But if you didn't notice, the *chairwoman* of a huge damn company lost her job. It will be costing her a fortune in legal fees. Her public image has been damaged - and I'd bet this impacts her future earnings because people are now questioning her judgement (first she brought in Carly with all the problems that caused, then she dropped HP in a scandal, etc). Not only her, but the general counsel who advised her has gone as well. We've also lost a couple of board members, one on principle, one because he got caught out.
You know what - no-one outside of HP has been harmed. No-one has lost money, or had any propery stolen or damaged. Executives have not engaged in a fraudulent effort to fiddle the numbers, backdate stock options, or cheat customers. Suppliers have not been threatened using M$-style tactics. Government has not been lobbied to allow the use of some potent, environment killing chemical. Some people have had their privacy invaded, which is wrong (particulary where friends and family are concerned), but frankly the journalists are enjoying the whole thing - they've got significantly more column inches out of this than anything else HP has done recently.
If you're hoping for more to happen beyond board members and executives being sacked and pushed out the door to handle lawsuits on their own *when no-one has been hurt*, just piss off and listen to emo or some shit. The world is too nasty a place for you to deal with.
I suspect that most every CEO and board member in a large public corporation is liable for insider trading charges.
and the rest of use don't stand a chance until every single one of these cases is rooted out.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If you think the journalists are enjoying this, you've never been stalked/investigated for
absolutely no good reason. Wait until it happens to your daughter, and then we'll talk again.
It's that very insouciance about the harm done that bothers many
of us about what HP did. They really don't seem to understand why it's wrong. Have you ever
been robbed? Come home to find strangers had pawed through your underwear to find any hidden
jewelry?
It feels like that.
And for a journalist's phone records to be obtained damages them professionally, because no
one will dare to speak to them by phone any more. Don't you at least get that part?
My flatmate was stalked once. Very unpleasant - suspicious phone calls, the guy loitering outside the block of flats, physical damage to the flat (ex-boyfriend, so the locks had to be changed). Clare was fucking scared. Never been investigated personally, although I have suffered two break ins (including my account cleaned out just in time for Christmas, that was fun), and been physically assaulted once, leading to time off work and staying at home eating takeaway til my face recovered enough.
Am I sufficiently qualified to talk to you now? I am perfectly well aware of the feeling you get when your privacy is invaded, and very much doubt that being investigated makes you anywhere near as instinctively nervous about going outside as being attacked.
And I tell you this - the bunch of guys who kicked the shit out of me are known to the police. They're not rich, but they didn't get even get their wrists slapped. It was in their neighbourhood and strangely no witnesses came forward. If they had been stuck in the international press, lost their jobs, and been left open to a civil law suit, I'd have been absolutely fucking delighted.
I'm pretty damn sure if the guys who broke into my house didn't take anything, were caught but found to have a) been first time offenders, and b) been found to have reasons to believe (albeit faulty ones) that I was e.g. sleeping with their wife, they wouldn't have got jail time. And failing jail time, being publically humiliated is probably the most you could expect from the courts.
If the journalists were worried about people not daring to speak to them, there wouldn't have been articles in the national press with their name and picture telling everyone about it.
A multi-billion dollar company has someone at board level leaking confidental information. That opens up risks of insider trading and all sorts of things. The board is obliged to take it seriously and investigate. No, this does not justify what they actually did, but don't give me the "absolutely no good reason" line.
HP did something wrong. Several senior level people have lost their jobs. In my experience, the actions taken by HP are commensurate with any harm inflicted and a damn sight more than many other companies might have done.
If you have examples showing they've been let off lightly compared to others doing comparable things, or have a good reason why your personal experience is better than mine or the general legal framework for assessing what is illegal and what the punishment should be, I'm all ears.