The Wall Street Journal picked up the same gossip that we did about the resignation of IBM Europe chief Hans-Olaf Henkel (CI No 2,496), but Henkel denied any rift with IBM Corp chairman Louis Gerstner, said the talk was absolute rubbish and said he was leaving to go for an opportunity which I couldn’t miss in Germany; he declined to say what his new post would be, although some German journalists speculated that it might be a prominent public-service job; some IBM officials in the US have been grumbling lately that the European operations should be cutting jobs more quickly, the Journal says, adding that that doesn’t appear to have been a factor in Herr Henkel’s departure.
