HP sues its former CEO to protect trade secrets

Mark Hurd played a big role in Hewlett Packard’s success, from being an unknown to being the Chief Executive Officer that brought it to the top leaving competitor Dell behind, but when a sexual harassment suit was filed against him, HP Board of Directors forced him to resign even if the suit was settled out of court. Now Hurd signed up with Oracle as Co-President to replace Charles Phillips who has had a sex scandal of his own – woman he was having an affair with posted a picture of them together on billboards (!) and created a website with all their lovey dovey pictures together – when I saw this on the news I just had to laugh out loud, but of course Oracle denies that the sex scandal had anything to do with its former President’s resignation, a news article posits that contractual mistakes may have been the real reason; HP then sues Hurd and seeks to enjoin him from being Co-President at Oracle alleging that this will violate the confidentiality agreement between the parties which Hurd signed as part of his severance package. The problem is that, according to reports, even if HP did release this statement in their website, it seems that Hurd did not sign any non-compete agreement, it came to me as very surprising that HP ‘s in house counsels did not even think of including such a clause in the severance agreement, Hurd is very good at what he does, he wasn’t even forced to resign because he made a mistake with his work, the first clause their lawyers should’ve come up with was the non-compete clause because what if Hurd was invited by Dell instead? Aside from the fact that HP lost a very talented CEO, (not to say that what HP did was wrong, in fact what they did was to protect their company image, but I’m saying they should’ve made sure that their rights were fully protected) they also gave Hurd $40 million as severance pay then they’re going to spend some more money on the suit they filed then Oracle is threatening to sever any relations with them because of the suit, it seems HP is losing more and more by the minute, however, it does depend on the severance agreement signed by Hurd if the clauses therein can be construed as prohibiting him from divulging industry secrets plus the fact that company secrets is protected by US laws.