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House of daggers

The knives are being sharpened for Pattie Dunn. The non-executive chairman of Hewlett-Packard - best known in the UK for her time at Barclays where she is still a paid adviser - is under growing pressure because of her role in the boardroom bust-up at the American printer maker.

In essence, Ms Dunn stands accused of ordering private detectives to spy on her fellow board members in a bid to identify the source of continuing embarrassing leaks of top-level discussions. Phone records of journalists were obtained by questionable means.

The leaks have plagued Ms Dunn almost from the moment she was elevated to non-executive chairman of HP in February 2005, after serving on the board for seven years.

Ironically, she began her career as a journalist, giving up at the age of 25 to join the asset management arm of the US bank Wells Fargo as a temp working in publicity. She spent the next two decades there, rising to the highest echelons when Barclays took over and the firm was subsumed into Barclays Global Investors, which she then led. Under her leadership BGI grew to one of the biggest fund managers in the world.

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She abandoned her executive role at BGI in 2002 because of ill health, but remains an adviser on strategy.