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.
