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."

Comments

Not as suspicious as it sounds

[Josh Lindenmuth]

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.

get those rascals out!

[hguorbray]

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?