Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson has quit – 10 days after it was revealed that he did not have one of the academic qualifications claimed in his personal résumé.
The latest leadership crisis to hit the struggling US internet company also led it to call a truce with dissident investor Third Point, which uncovered the inflated claim that triggered the scandal. The New York hedge fund, which owns 5.8 per cent of the company, will get three of the four board seats it had been pressing for, ending a showdown that had been set to come to a head at Yahoo’s next annual meeting.
Mr Thompson’s departure comes less than five months after he was hired to inject a new sense of urgency into the group as it struggles to compete with Facebook and Google in online advertising. He made impatience the hallmark of a management style that was meant to shake Yahoo out of a drift into irrelevance, though his main contribution during a brief tenure was to continue recent rounds of retrenchment with the cutting of a further 2,000 jobs.