Hewlett-Packard has filed a lawsuit against former chief executive Mark Hurd after it was revealed that he is to join eneterprise systems vendor Oracle as co-president. 

By accepting the role, HP alleges in its lawsuit, "Hurd has put HP’s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril."

"Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP’s trade secrets and confidential information to others," it claims.

Oracle announced on Sunday that Hurd would be joining the company as co-president, replacing Charles Philips, who has resigned.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, remarked that Hurd’s experience of integrating software and hardware products while CEO of NCR, back when it owned data warehouse appliance vendor Teradata, would be invaluable as Oracle integrates Sun Microsystems. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark,” he said.

The first integrated product to result from the partnership between Oracle and Sun is the Exadata data warehouse system, which used to be based on HP hardware.

Hurd is known to be a personal friend of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Ellison lambasted HP when Hurd was ousted last month after a sexual harassment probe uncovered “questionable” payments to former adult film star Jodie Fisher.

“The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,” Ellison wrote at the time.

Charles Philips suffered his own personal scandal earlier this year, when former mistress YaVaughnie Wilkins took out billboards in San Francisco revealing their affair. Philips asked to resign from Oracle in December 2009, Ellison said yesterday, but agreed to stay on to help with the Sun integration.