On February 3 Motorola, the struggling US-based mobile phone maker, announced a $3.6bn fourth quarter loss and took the opportunity to reveal that Paul Liska, the company’s chief financial officer had left the company after less than a year in the job.
When analysts questioned Greg Brown, Motorola’s chief executive, during a conference call about the reasons for Mr Liska’s departure, Mr Brown chose his words carefully but indicated that it related to the company’s decision to postpone the planned spin-off of its loss-making mobile phone business.
“As it relates to Paul, I do want to say, he did a lot of good work here and helped us get a lot of the heavy lifting done around this separation and preparation for separation,” said the Motorola CEO. “That said, I think the business environment’s changed and given the environmental changes, we thought the change was appropriate at this time.”
Just over two weeks later however, the relationship between Motorola and Mr Liska, a former finance chief of Sears, Roebuck, had soured with both sides trading increasingly acrimonious charges in the Chicago courts.
Court filings show that on February 19, after analysing the events leading to Mr Liska’s departure, Motorola officials decided to terminate him ‘for cause’ due to “serious misconduct and incompetence.”
The following day Mr Liska filed a ‘retaliatory discharge’ or ‘whistleblower’suit against the company which he accused of firing him because he had questioned financial projections for the company’s mobile-devices unit.
The Schaumburg, Illinois-based company responded to the court filing in a statement to the Chicago Tribune describing Mr Liska as a “treacherous officer” who connived to “scheme designed to portray himself as a whistleblower and demand millions in return for his silence.” In court papers, the company said he was dismissed for “his extortionate scheme to enrich himself.”
Now Motorola has asked an Illinois judge to punish Mr Liska, for allegedly destroying evidence on a laptop computer. In papers filed with Judge Allen Goldberg in Chicago, lawyers for the company accused Mr Liska of deleting and destroyed documents on the computer before returning it to the company. The Judge is due to hear arguments in the case on April 29. In the meantime, Motorola and Mr Liska’s lawyer declined to comment.
