PARIS - The board of Gemplus International SA will ask its chairman at a meeting today to fill in as chief executive if they fail to agree on a former AT&T Corp. executive for the job, people familiar with the situation said Wednesday.
Alex Mandl, a former chief operating officer of AT&T, has been in the recruitment mill for several weeks, and his candidacy has been reviewed by a selection committee, said people close to Gemplus, the world's largest smart card maker.
However, the board consensus for Mr. Mandl, an Austrian-born U.S. citizen, has weakened so much that his name may not even be put forward at the meeting, these people said.
"If Mandl isn't appointed, I think we could trust [chairman Dominique] Vignon to act as CEO for an interim period," said one person who will take part in the meeting.
Several people familiar with the hiring process said Mr. Vignon would be the only alternative should Mr. Mandl not be chosen. Mr. Vignon, former chairman and CEO of the French nuclear engineering company Framatome SA, was appointed chairman of Gemplus in June.
The interim CEO, Ronald Mackintosh, has said he would step down when a successor has been appointed.
Gemplus has been engulfed in a management crisis since the resignation of founder Marc Lassus last year, and feuding board members are struggling to select a chief executive.
Mr. Mandl is viewed as a controversial candidate by Gemplus employees in France and by some board members because of his ties with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He was a trustee of In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit organization set up by the CIA in late 1999 to keep pace with the Internet technology boom.
"If this can soothe the concerns of some board members, I'm sure Mandl would be ready to resign from In-Q-Tel," one person familiar with the hiring process said.
Critics at Gemplus also question Mr. Mandl's leadership of Teligent Inc., an upstart telecommunications company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after he left it.
Mr. Mandl is also a director of Dell Computer Corp.
