[tw]

Voting has been reported by the counting firm (IVX of Delaware?). The merger was approved by about 2.8%. Even if Deutche Bank's 17 million shares were manipulated illegally, the voting difference was 45 million. However the count will not be certified until after an SEC investigation is completed. Even if those Bank shares are declared invalid, the HP/Compaq merger is a done deal.

Remove all Hewlett and Packard family shares from the voting, and the big funds voted for the merger by a factor of two to one. It demonstrates how differently the finance types view what makes a company productive - especially when HP employees - the people who come from where the work gets done - were against the merger by about 4 to 1.

Now for a real question - how long will HP slowly downsize, like Apple under Sculley and Spindler, before HP BoDs throw out the problem - Fiorina. I expect this to be a long, slow, diminishing of HP.

Sidenote - in the stockholder meeting, the counting firm noted that all votes would be locked in a secure container and taken to a secret location for counting. People laughed. The IVX representative then noted that some shareholder votings (probably in another company) were previously corrupted when someone stole the votes while they were in transit. As he said, "It has happened".