HP's shareholder settlement deal over Autonomy merger DENIED – again A US district judge has thrown out a proposed settlement deal of a sueball lobbed at HP by some of the company's shareholders, after it bought Blighty software outfit Autonomy for $10.7bn in 2011. "The shareholders appear to be relinquishing a whole universe of potential claims regarding HP governance and practices with no …
HP are one of those rare companies that everything they do is completely beyond comprehension. There are people who believe that this is because their board and senior management are comprised of the sort of people who forget whether their underpants go outside or inside their trousers, and for who, the act of tying shoelaces is and advanced act of complex magic, thought and action, given only to the elder gods.
I believe that HP's actions are incomprehensible because the company is staffed by ur-humans and evolved lifeforms.
I wonder who's right?
A conundrum indeed.
“But as it now stands, the Second Amended Settlement confers a substantial benefit on the individual defendants and derivative plaintiffs’ counsel...”
So because the judge has spotted that the settlement gives the defendants a get out of jail card applicable to all previous misdemeanors and lines the pockets of the lawyers defending them with no benefit to the plaintiffs, they are all going to have to go back to square one and try to thrash out something a little less lop-sided. For which the aforementioned lawyers plus their counterparts can continue with their snouts in the trough.
It does make you wonder which side the plaintiffs' lawyers are on if they agreed to such a settlement.
Let's remind ourselves again that even if Autonomy's books turn out to be entirely clean, HP *still* paid around $3B more than anybody else thought Autonomy was worth.
And the $8.8B they want to write down would mean that Autonomy was worth *less than nothing* when they bought it. The only level on which that makes sense is that HP is trying to bury a whole lot of write-downs for other mistakes with this corpse.
The whole Autonomy saga makes HP's board and senior leadership look spherically incompetent: equally incompetent whichever way you look at it.
I think the word you're looking for is "Pointy haired".
Sadly, a lot of large corporations have most of the management and up layer thinking about only one thing, how do I climb the ladder?
Doing your job right is, sadly, rarely how it's accomplished. So you end up with a lot of brown nosed idiots who just throw a fit when things don't magically happen how they wanted it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
