SYDNEY: Andrew Johnson, is still CEO of the unsettled Australian Computer Society, six weeks after he was asked to resign, Graeme Philipson has reported for ITWire.
“His abrupt departure was only temporary. He announced he was leaving on LinkedIn and changed his profile, but now he is back as CEO, on LinkedIn and in person, after a short ‘holiday’,” says Philipson.
He quotes unnamed sources from within ACS as saying that that the society’s new president Ian Oppermann had demanded Johnson’s resignation, but that Johnson had been asked to return by the ACS management committee, “where he has many allies”.
ACS has been in turmoil since it lost a court case brought against it last December, in which the judge overturned the results of a vote in October 2019 to change the organisation from a membership-based society to a company limited by guarantee.
The judge roundly criticised Johnson, company secretary Andrew Madry and then president Yohan Ramasundara for irregularities in the calling and conduct of the meeting and the vote on the structural changes.
The judge found that they had stacked the meeting with supporters by not publicising it correctly, and then invalidated an opponent’s vote on a technicality when the result threatened to go against them. ACS was ordered to pay the costs of the group of members who had taken them to court, and also had to pay its own substantial legal fees. The total cost to the ACS has been estimated at more than half a million dollars, though the leadership has refused to disclose the exact amount.
