Wigley on Pocock's appointment

"We very much welcome Mike. He brings impressive leadership skills and experience from his considerable success in a range of businesses, which made him stand out from a strong candidate list and suit him ideally to the challenges and opportunities of Yell. With the arrival of our new CFO designate and the appointment of Mike, we have the right team in place to manage a seamless succession and to take Yell forward in the next stages of its development."

Given that Wigley stated that Pocock was a "Stand Out from a Strong Candidate List" we can only assume that the list of candidates was not as strong as Wigley suggested. Wigley also commented - "Prior to Linksys, Michael was President and Chief Executive of Polaroid Corporation, which he joined in 2003, leading the recovery of the company to profitability and being instrumental in its sale to Petters Group Worldwide for $426 million in 2006."

This was a misrepresentation of the truth. In reality, Tom Petters (owner of Petters Group Worldwide) had been sentenced to 50 years in jail in April 2010 for running a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme, including the purchase of Polaroid in 2005 with money from the scheme which helped to  ‘legitimise’ his fraudulent activities. Wigley should have been fully aware of this in the course of making background checks prior to Pocock’s appointment, and Pocock was under an obligation to declare it. 

Within 6 months of becoming CEO of Yell, Pocock hired three executives, Mark Payne, (Chief Operating Officer), Bob Gregerson, (Chief Consumer Officer) and Chris Landry (Head of Brand and & Design) It had taken just a short time  for Pocock to recruit three prominent members of his familiar ‘restructuring team’ to entirely new and very senior management positions at Yell.  It gave him complete operational control and minimised the impact of potential dissenting voices.

All three had worked under Mike Pocock on major ‘restructuring’ exercises at Polaroid, Cisco-Linksys and Compaq; and Gregerson and Landry had done so at Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation as well. But their extremely close links were never highlighted. 

Had hibu shareholders been informed of the closeness of the ‘connection’, they would have been forewarned of the events that would inevitably follow.

The career histories of Payne, Gregerson and Landry contain evidence that, whenever Pocock took up a senior role at a large company, they immediately left their existing positions to join him, regardless of the seniority of the positions they currently held. All also left hibu in March 2014 (together with Pocock) immediately after the ‘restructuring’ was complete.

Pocock instigated and approved a name change for the company from Yell to Hibu. This change entailed ditching the well-known and popular brand name, which had given rise to a significant proportion of the company’s ‘value’, and replacing it with an eminently forgettable brand name that Pocock himself acknowledged meant absolutely nothing. The strategy served to protect the legacy brand of Yell and Yellow Pages while hibu was used as a special purpose vehicle to defraud shareholders.

We believe that Bob Wigley hired Mike Pocock primarily to perform the task of decreasing the company’s value, while appearing to promote it, with the ultimate aim of benefiting the Directors themselves and the Lenders. 

Inexplicable purchases of companies such as Znode and Moonfruit intensified the pressure on the company’s finances and potential breaches of covenants.