Gaston Bastiaens

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Gaston Bastiaens (Westerlo (Belgium) December 16, 1946) is a Belgian engineer and businessman. As a vice president of Philips Electronics, he was responsible for the Compact Disc as well as for CD-i, CD-ROM, Philips' contributions to the MPEG standard and the foundations for the DVD. In 1992 he moved to Apple Computer and became a Vice President and the first General Manager of Apple's newly formed Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) division in the early 1990s. In this role, he oversaw the launch of the Apple Newton PDA. At the end of 1994, he left Apple after the Newton project, with John Sculley's departure in 1993, had lost much of its internal support and was starting to turn into a technical and commercial failure.

He spent two years at the Internet applications company Quarterdeck, USA, as its president and chief executive officer. After a series of disastrous acquisitions at the company, he left in September 1996 after two successive quarters of significant losses. Quarterdeck became a penny stock and got bought out by Symantec.

He quickly found a new job. In 1996 he joined Lernout & Hauspie, L&H, a speech technology company based in Belgium. In 2001 he was arrested at his Boston home and sent to his native Belgium to face charges for which he could face up to ten years in prison. The charges relate to insider trading related to the technology company L&H. L&H went finally bankrupt in October 25, 2001, after struggling for about a year.