HP chairman steps down in the wake of corporate difficulties
Hewlett-Packard Chairman Ray Lane stepped down on Thursday as the head of the historic PC maker’s board of directors following a mismanaged acquisition of software company Autonomy.
As we reported in November, HP announced that an internal investigation had found "accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures" in the financial records of Autonomy, the unstructured "big data" analysis software firm acquired by HP in 2011. HP said it had learned of the issue after being tipped off by "a senior member of Autonomy's leadership team." The disclosure came as HP took a non-cash accounting charge of $8.8 billion—over $5 billion of it related directly to Autonomy's alleged book-cooking.
