Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is riding high since she put up another strong debate performance on Wednesday, with a new poll showing her vaulting into second place in the GOP primary.
But she is set to face more scrutiny befitting her status in the top tier of the GOP primary race. One example was the grilling she took during an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Fiorina, who lost a Senate bid by 10 points to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif, in 2010, was on the defensive about her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, where she oversaw a drop in stock at the company and layoffs of about 30,000 employees.
Wallace also asked Fiorina about a European subsidiary of HP that was investigated for selling hundreds of millions of dollars in computer equipment to Iran, in violation of international sanctions.
Fiorina has been in favor of keeping sanctions on Iran and against the Obama administration’s deal that lifts sanctions in exchange for winding down Iran’s nuclear program.
Fiorina shot back that HP was “larger than each of the 50 states.”
“It is a larger budget than any one of our 50 states and a global enterprise. And so it’s impossible to ensure that nothing wrong ever happens,” she said, adding that the question is what you do when you find out about it.
Fiorina said that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation proved that neither she nor anyone else in management knew about the subsidiary’s sales in the Middle East.
“That company was doing business with another company that was doing business with Iran,” she added. “And when the company discovered this three years after I left, they cut off all ties with those companies.”
The Boston Globe reported in 2008 that HP used a third-party distributor called Redington Gulf in 1997 to sell printers to Iran. The economic sanctions against Iran went into place in 1995.
Fiorina also took heat for the company’s stock dropping 80 percent in 2003.
She responded that the tech market as a whole had a lot of problems at the time, and then pivoted away from the issue of the company’s stock price.
“You know, there are people who look at a stock one day at a time. I never led that way,” she said. “The job of the chief executive is to build sustainable shareholder value over time. That is what we did.”
The former CEO also defended massive layoffs that she made while she led the company, saying that she provided “the richest severance packages in the industry.”
“But when you have a big, bloated bureaucracy that costs too much, that is becoming inept — and by the way, that’s what we have in Washington, D.C. — then there are some jobs that have to go away,” she said.
