Held Together By Paperclip

Network Europe’s boardroom bust-up has ended with three resignations and evidence suggests there’s also a financial price to pay.

Corrado Gioia of Hard Staff in Italy, Marc Lambelet from Black Lamb in Switzerland, and Tapio Korjus of Rockadillo in Finland have quit. A statement announcing the news thanked them for “ventilating their thoughts” on how to improve the organisation. A statement said recent disagreements within the former board made a change “inevitable.”

Backroom rows about the distribution of the workload and disagreements over the direction the Network was taking have rumbled on for a couple of years, intensifying after the 2008 board meeting in Oslo and coming to a head after meetings in Germany and Italy.

The new board is Rob Berends of Paperclip, a co-founder of Network and the only member to survive the changes, alongside Attilio Perissinotti of Virus Concerti in Italy and Thomas Ryjord from Norway’s Storås Artist.

It’s the biggest shake-up the Network has endured since being founded in 1986, including when it switched from being an informal project to an official association in 2003.

One of the new board’s first tasks will be to repair the financial damage the row looks to have caused, as membership has dropped from 73 at the beginning of 2007 to 41 at the latest count.

Berends believes the various rumours of disagreements negatively impacted the organisation’s image.

The new board was elected at Eurosonic-Noorderslag, the first time Network Europe has met since the three former board members gave notice that they were quitting.