James Whatley (@Whatleydude), SpinVox‘s head of digital and social media, has quit. Whatley’s job was to interact openly with the public and the industry about SpinVox, both on the SpinVox blog and on Twitter. His departure from the company suggests that he no longer feels able to do so, having recently crossed swords with the media a number of times.
SpinVox is currently facing a tsunami of allegations about the way the company has been run. The UK’s Sunday Times has seen a copy of the company’s unaudited 2008 accounts, which suggest that SpinVox’s losses widened by 30% that year. In addition, a six-page “dossier” is circulating that allegedly contains explosive claims about misappropriated resources.
Keen observers will have noticed that Whatley has been edging out of the door for some time. At the beginning of August, SpinVox’s Twitter feed suggested as much. On his personal blog, Whatley wrote today: “It’s become very clear to me that the shelf-life I predicted for this chapter of my career was accurate. It’s time to move on.”
TechCrunch Europe suspected this was coming some time ago. Indeed, we even wrote a pre-emptive story about it in anticipation of the news which was accidentally posted owing to a bug in the WordPress for BlackBerry software. (Naturally, we apologised to Whatley at the time.)
His resignation as head of digital and social media follows those of several other employees, including David Lindsay and Simon Mackintosh, whose last words about the company can be read in a number of ways.
SpinVox’s global head of PR, Jane Henry, was unavailable for comment when the news broke, but we’ve reached out to her and will update this post when she gets in touch.