Ex-Thomas Cook Boss Green Lands Top IBM Role

Harriet Green, the former boss of Thomas Cook, is to take on a senior role at the troubled American computing giant IBM as she seeks to rebuild her executive career.

Sky News can exclusively reveal that Ms Green is to become a divisional head at IBM, one of the most famous names in the global technology industry.

Her appointment is expected to be announced to the New York Stock Exchange on Monday.

It will come 10 months after she left Thomas Cook after falling out with boardroom colleagues at the tour operator.

An accomplished businesswoman, Ms Green is widely credited with having rescued Thomas Cook from the brink of collapse when she joined the heavily-indebted travel company in 2011.

She engineered a restructuring of the group's balance sheet and operations, in the process shedding thousands of jobs.

Her turnaround of the business led to her receiving a number of awards, and she was quickly being linked with a number of FTSE-100 chief executive posts.

However, her legacy was clouded by a row which erupted this year over Thomas Cook's handling‎ of the deaths of two children in Corfu in 2006 while on a package holiday sold by the company.

Ms Green was chief executive of Thomas Cook when it tried to block an inquest into their deaths, while the children's parents accused her of‎ refusing to meet with them to discuss their situation.

She repeatedly denied that that had been the case.

In June, Ms‎ Green was awarded shares worth more than £5.5m based on her performance during her two-and-a-half years in charge.

Under her, Thomas Cook's share price soared from 16.25p to 136p, and the company is now again financially secure.

Ms Green pledged to donate ‎one-third of her share award to charities chosen in consultation with the parents of the two children.

After the public relations disaster that befell Thomas Cook earlier this year, it recruited Justin King, the former boss of J Sainsbury, to lead an independent review of crisis management and customer health and safety‎ procedures at the company.

Ms Green's arrival at IBM will mark another change in industry for her, although the early part of her executive career was spent at Arrow Electronics, an American ‎company which supplies services to computing firms.

One ally said she had deliberately chosen a US-based role as the next stage of her career, although she is expected to spend a substantial amount of time in the UK.

Joining IBM will allow her to avoid the level of attention with which she is said to have grown uncomfortable‎ during the latter part of her time at Thomas Cook.

A relentless networker, Ms Green gave an unusually candid interview to The Times shortly before her departure from the tour operator, saying that she didn't "deal well with needy people" and that people "generally eat and sleep too much".

A former member of David Cameron's Business Advisory Group, Ms Green is also a non-executive director of BAE Systems, Britain's biggest defence contractor, and of Emerson, a US-based industrial group.

Her arrival at IBM, ‎which has a market capitalisation of $144bn (£93bn), will come at a difficult time for the early pioneer of personal computing.

Its share price has fallen by more than 20% during the past year, and ‎its chief executive, Ginni Rometty, is under pressure to reverse declining sales, which have been in negative territory for 13 consecutive quarters.

IBM has announced a string of investments‎ in growth areas such as cloud computing but no longer makes the PCs with which it was associated for many years, having sold that division to Lenovo, a Chinese company.

IBM declined to comment on Saturday while a spokeswoman for Ms Green could not be reached for comment.