Business news for Mon, 31 Dec 2007 & with word officer. 6 news.

Chief financial officer of China's leading search engine dies over holiday.

MC Hammer hasn't topped the music charts since the early 1990s, but the former rap star says he has another hit in him ? only this time around he'll produce it as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Burrell, is choreographing a new career as co-founder and chief strategy officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based DanceJam.com.

Iris Hagilboa is appealing the court ruling that voided the tender it won to build an IKEA outlet in Rishon Letzion. The company, which is the arm through which the Bronfman-Fisher group won the tender, says the Tel Aviv court had based its ruling, that the equal footing of all contenders for the tender had been impaired by of a single meeting an Iris Hagilboa officer held with the Rishon Letzion municipality before the tender was issued. ...

The chief financial officer of Chinese search engine Baidu.com died after an accident while on vacation in China.

American Tower Corp. sued Jide Zeitlin, an ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. manager who runs a competing cellphone tower company, claiming he impersonated American Tower's chief executive officer to send negative e-mails to two of its biggest investors.

CHINA'S Internet search firm Baidu.com said yesterday that its chief financial officer, Shawn Wang, died in an accident while on vacation in China. Wang, who joined Baidu in 2004 and helped the company successfully list on the Nasdaq stock market in 2005, died on December 27 during a Christmas-New Year holiday. Company officials declined to give further details. The company said it plans to replace him but also gave no further details. "Under Wang's leadership, this year Baidu became one of the four biggest firms in the US by stock transaction volume and the first Chinese company to join the Nasdaq 100 index," Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li said in an e-mail to employees. "Besides his contribution to financial affairs, he also led the company's legal and human resources departments to fruitful achievements," Li said. Baidu had a 60.5-percent share of China's search engine market in the third quarter, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys