By Kevin McCauley
Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who today is expected to succeed embattled Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, has hired her long-time communications chief Henry Gomez as a consultant, according to the AllThingsD site.
Gomez, 47, is former PR executive of Home Box Office who ran a joint promotion with eBay in `99. That led to Gomez applying for a job at the online auction house, dining with Whitman in February 2000 and landing the PR job the next month.
He worked on Whitman's unsuccessful run for California's governorship against Jerry Brown last year, overseeing speechwriting and press operations.
Whitman, 55, will be H-P's seventh CEO since 1999. She took a board seat at H-P in January. Like Apotheker, Whitman has no experience in running a hardware company.
Apotheker, who lasted 11 months in the post, took heat for the pricey $11.7B deal to acquire British software company Autonomy and for yanking H-P's TouchPad tablet from the market after a few months. He also announced a controversial plan to spin-off H-P's PC business.
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