To add one fictitious qualification to one’s CV might be overlooked as poetic licence. But to claim three degrees from some of the world’s leading universities must be dangerously close to fraud.

The only consolation for Patrick Imbardelli, who until yesterday was chief executive of InterContinental Hotels Group’s Asia Pacific region, was that he was allowed to resign after his deception was discovered rather than suffering the additional ignominy of being sacked.

Mr Imbardelli’s duplicity was discovered only when IHG ran checks on his academic background ahead of his elevation to the group’s main board next month.

The company announced yesterday that he would no longer be joining the board and had resigned.

IHG said that the checks had revealed that he had earned none of the degrees on his CV. He claimed to have two from Cornell University in America – a Bachelor of Science in Hotel Administration and a Master of Business Administration – plus a Bachelor of Business Studies and Hotel Management from Victoria University in his native Australia.

A spokesman for IHG said: “We understand he attended classes at both universities but did not graduate from either.” He said that the group had no issue with Mr Imbardelli’s ability to do his job, adding: “With s o m e t h i n g like this, the fundamental basis of trust is undermined.”

He refused to say why the group had decided to run the checks but admitted that they were not routine. “Information came to light subsequently to the announcement of his appointment to the board.”

Analysts suggested that the mention of a degree from Victoria University in the announcement may have prompted someone who knew that it was false to blow the whistle.

The 46-year-old will receive no payoff, although IHG has agreed to pay him for another two months to give him time to arrange the transfer of his family from Singapore, where his office is based, back to Australia. He is married with two children, aged two and four.

Mr Imbardelli’s fall from grace is all the more acute given his recent successes. Just two weeks after David Webster, IHG’s chairman, was lauding the “wealth of experience” and “operational management skills” he would bring to the board, he was named Hotelier of the Year at the Asia Pacific Hotel Investment Conference.

The Australian, who is thought to have been on a salary of between £300,000 and £400,000, was highly respected in the industry, having spent 25 years working for companies such as Hilton International, Hyatt Corporation and Southern Pacific Hotels. He became managing director of IHG’s Asia Pacific region in 2003.

His resignation has shocked friends and colleagues alike. One said: “He’s a good guy and well liked within the business. It’s very sad but when the facts came out he had to resign. He did the right thing.”

Mr Imbardelli joined IHG, then part of Bass, in 2000. His personnel file, complete with the false CV, was transferred across without any checks being made.

He was probably tempting fate when, in a recent interview with Hotel magazine, he said: “IHG is a FTSE 100 company with 3,300 hotels worldwide, and I’m not going to jeopardise our reputation.”

Degrees of mendacity

InterContinental Hotels joins a growing list of embarrassed employers.

If Barings Bank had dug a little deeper before hiring Nick Leeson, it may have uncovered the county court judgments he omitted in his application.

Similarly, Radio Shack, the US electronics retailer, failed to spot the discrepancies in the CV of Dave Edmondson, its chief executive. He claimed to have earned two degrees from a small Bible college he had attended for just a year.

In 2002 Ronald Zarrella, chairman and chief executive of Bausch & Lomb, kept his job after the eye-care company learnt that he did not earn an MBA from New York University. The board declined Mr Zarrella’s offer to resign but he forfeited a $1.1 million bonus.

Richard Li, chairman of Hong Kong telecoms group PCCW, had to remove claims on his company’s website he graduated from Stanford.

Ann Wilson, managing director of BBC Technology, was sacked in 2004 for “misuse of hospitality”. It was later discovered that she was a convicted fraudster. In 1997, she had resigned as head of global electronic commerce at Philips subsidiary Origin after her record came to light. Even after the BBC, she got a job at headhunter Korn/Ferry and was made a nonexecutive director at Datamonitor. In June 2005, less than four months after hiring her, Datamonitor announced she had resigned “for personal reasons”.

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