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As reported by the Wall Avenue Journal (opens in new tab), Activision Blizzard chief compliance officer Frances Townsend has stepped down from her place. Whereas not an worker of the corporate, she’s going to proceed to serve its board as an advisor.
The transfer comes as Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of the corporate slowly works its method to completion, although not with out regulatory hurdles like a latest problem from a UK watchdog (opens in new tab).
Townsend was a controversial determine earlier than becoming a member of Activision Blizzard. Within the early 2000s, in the course of the invasion of Iraq, she held the place of Assistant to the President for Homeland Safety and Counterterrorism beneath George W. Bush.
The Washington Publish (opens in new tab) reported in 2004 that Townsend toured the notorious Abu Ghraib jail in the course of the top of the US navy’s torturing of prisoners on the facility (opens in new tab). In keeping with the Publish, an officer on the jail instructed US Military investigators that Townsend pressured him to extract extra and higher info from prisoners in his capability as head of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Heart at Abu Ghraib. Townsend, for her half, denied witnessing abuse of prisoners throughout her tour.
In July of 2021 near the outbreak of the Activision Blizzard controversy (opens in new tab), Townsend emailed staff (opens in new tab) relating to the allegations in opposition to the corporate. She claimed the California Division of Truthful Employment and Housing lawsuit “offered a distorted and unfaithful image of [Activision Blizzard], together with factually incorrect, outdated, and out of context tales—some from greater than a decade in the past.”
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick subsequently assumed accountability for the content material of the offending e mail. Townsend, nonetheless, stepped down from a place sponsoring a girls’s community on the firm, and later deleted her Twitter (opens in new tab) after sparking controversy by sharing an article vital of whistleblowers.
In keeping with Bloomberg (opens in new tab), Bobby Kotick wrote in an e mail that Townsend “did a very distinctive job” throughout her tenure. The WSJ stories that Townsend’s former duties as ethics and compliance officer and company secretary are being assumed by her deputies Jen Brewer and Luci Altman respectively.
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