Ex-Motorola CFO Paul Liska has filed a lawsuit claiming he was unlawfully fired for raising issue with the company’s financial forecasts. A BusinessWeek report notes that, according to the filing, in the fourth-quarter of 2008 Liska began to “develop concerns that the executives within the Mobile Devices Business were, intentionally or recklessly, materially misstating its 2009 forecasts and strategic plans.” He said these forecasts were based on inaccurate or unsupportable financial assumptions and ignored facts known to co-CEOs Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha. Liska, the complaint says, warned Motorola’s board of directors about the “continual forecasting errors,” saying that they would have a “significant deleterious impact on Motorola’s credit ratings and relationships.”

Liska’s departure was announced publicly on 3 February this year – the date of Motorola’s fourth-quarter results – but it was in a later SEC filing that Motorola officially terminated him with cause due to “serious misconduct and incompetence.” Liska claims a 16-day lag from 3 February to 19 February gave Motorola’s lawyers enough time to “concoct the false and malicious story” and said the vendor was trying to “destroy his reputation in retaliation for raising legitimate concerns” about Motorola’s struggling mobile devices division. Motorola denies Liska’s claims and has filed a response to the lawsuit.