Mark Hurd not out of the woods yet as SEC investigates his HP departure

The nightmare for Mark Hurd just won’t end. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a probe to determine whether the former Hewlett-Packard CEO shared sensitive information about his old company.

The crux of the investigation revolves around whether Hurd, in one of his infamous lapses in judgment, spilled the beans on HP’s acquisition of Electronic Data Systems to former HP contractor, Jodie Fisher, in 2008. The deal was worth $13.9 billion when it happened.

Hurd resigned as CEO of HP earlier this year after he allegedly sexually harassed Fisher. The board investigated the sexual harassment claims, which then turned up inaccurate expense reports. Part of the SEC investigation also concerns his inconsistent expense reports. HP has shared the results of its investigation of the sexual harassment claims and inconsistent expense reports with the SEC already, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Oracle later hired Hurd as president. Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison said the claims were a poor excuse for forcing Hurd to resign. He called it “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.” Now that Hurd is on board with Oracle, Ellison put HP right in Oracle’s crosshairs.

Former SAP executive Léo Apotheker became HP’s new CEO after Hurd left, which is sure to drive up some animosity between the two companies. A jury ordered SAP to pay Oracle $1.3 billion recently after evidence showed that SAP’s U.S.-based business unit made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software with the goal of avoiding license fees and stealing customers. Oracle lawyers tried to get Apotheker to testify live in court, but they couldn’t locate him via subpoena servers.