By Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES — Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson resigned from the digital media company Sunday after a dissident shareholder called attention to his apparent misrepresentation of his college credentials.
Ross Levinsohn, formerly Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Americas region, was named interim chief executive, the company said in a statement.
The board of directors also named Fred Amoroso its new chairman. Amoroso, who is chief executive of Santa Clara, Calif., software company Rovi Corp., replaced Roy Bostock.
The shake-up is a victory for activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of the hedge fund Third Point, who questioned Thompson’s representation of his academic degrees.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said Sunday that its board agreed with Third Point to settle its pending proxy contest related to Yahoo’s 2012 annual meeting of shareholders.
Under the agreement, three Third Point nominees — Loeb, Harry J. Wilson and Michael J. Wolf — will join the Yahoo board effective Wednesday.
Bostock, Patti Hart, VJ Joshi, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson — all of whom previously disclosed their intentions not to stand for re-election — as well as Thompson stepped down from the board Sunday.
An EBay biography and recent Yahoo filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Thompson had degrees in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He has no computer science degree. Yahoo earlier this month called it an “inadvertent error.”
The discrepancy was flagged by Loeb, who discovered that Stonehill, a private Catholic school near Boston, didn’t begin offering computer science degrees until four years after Thompson had graduated.
Third Point is an investment firm headquartered in New York that manages $9 billion in assets.
EX-Yahoo users should sue Yahoo shareholders for deliberate breach of contract and exploitative manipulation. These are the JOKERS who fired Steve Jobs! Obama claimed his undergraduate diploma was in “Political Science and International Relations” (NY Times October 30 2007, Janny Scott) and elsewhere said it was in “national security” when Columbia only has an undergraduate department in Political Science. In Thompson’s day, computer courses were taught by statistics, electronics, accounting and other departments. If anything, those people who learned how to apply computers to a real application did a lot better work than today’s supposed “scientists”. But which liberal media would challenge the professulas who invented Obama so they can continue to rape the taxpayer with their grant grubbing? The same professulas who winked in dubious credentials from defunct central asian instituions a decade and a half ago. The real JOKER is Gengis Icahn who tore down Yahoo to elevate the Big Brother Gog Google. Yahoo had Briefcase long before anyone dreamed of clouds but he shut it down. Yahoo Shopping and Wallet were decimated because they competed with Ebay and Paypal. Even the sophisticated boolean language of AltaVista was destroyed so we all depend on Google’s hidden deal which let trial lawyers give you false science so you can hire them. The same way Steve Case destroyed CompuServe to avenge The Source. This Icahn Loeb Casuistry only reminds me of Elliot Sputzer. Merge Yahoo and AOL into Amazon!