Siebel ditches boss

Long walk, short plank

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 13th April 2005 14:41 GMT

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Siebel is replacing its CEO less than a year after he was appointed.

Mike Lawrie has only been top dog at Siebel since May last year. He has been replaced, effective immediately, by George Shaheen. Shaheen has been on the Siebel board since 1995.

Siebel said in a statement: "The Board and Mr. Lawrie agreed mutually that he would resign his position." The announcement comes just days after disappointing first quarter results.

Siebel expects revenues of between $297m and $300m in the first quarter, less than the $329m brought in for the same period last year. It predicts a loss of between $7m and $9m.

George Shaheen is the man who caused raised eyebrows in 1999 when he moved from boss of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) to head up online grocer Webvan. Webvan was amongst the more exuberant US dot-com startups - it raised $395m by floating on the stock exchange and spent $1bn building a chain of warehouses to supply customers before going bankrupt in 2001.

Mike Lawrie was poached from IBM to replace company founder Tom Siebel who stayed on as Siebel chairman. Lawrie was appointed in May 2004 to help turn the company around and gain it more revenue from smaller businesses.

Siebel is facing class action suits from disgruntled shareholders and from engineers claiming unpaid overtime.®

The press release for the appointment is here. ®