Chief Patent Officer for UC to Step Down : Education: Internal audit had cleared Carl Wootten of conflict of interest a week ago, but raised other questions about his activities.

The University of California’s chief patent officer resigned Wednesday, less than a week after an internal investigation cleared him of improperly steering contracts to a business partner but revealed that he once tried to get university funds for his own invention.

In his letter of resignation, Carl B. Wootten, director of UC’s Office of Technology Transfer, said he would step down from the $113,500-a-year post Aug. 1 after a four-year stint that has increased the university’s annual patent income from $9 million to $45 million. He said he was leaving because the university now wants to take a “less centralized” approach than when he took over the office in 1989.

His abrupt departure follows a university management audit that concluded Wootten did not violate state conflict-of-interest laws.

One UC source said, however, that some members of the UC Board of Regents were not satisfied with the outcome of the audit and that Wootten was essentially forced out as part of a widening rift between UC President Jack Peltason and some regents.

“We are less than pleased by the way this has been handled,” said one regent, who asked not to be identified.

The audit released last week is the second examination of Wootten’s activities. A previous review, issued by Peltason in April, exonerated the patent chief but drew criticism as being shallow, prompting regents in June to order a more thorough investigation.

Wootten, a former University of Virginia official, was the point man in the university’s efforts to make more money from faculty inventions and research applications. The entrepreneurial “for-profit” plan aimed at converting brainpower into patent royalties bogged down under faculty resistance. Peltason announced in March that he was shelving it.

Wootten’s connections became an issue in September when the San Francisco Examiner reported that he steered lucrative contracts to longtime friend and business partner Stanley P. Fisher, an Alexandria, Va., attorney. While he was exerting official influence, the newspaper reported, Wootten was in partnership with Fisher in Quorum-Intech Partners, a start-up high-tech firm.

UC has paid Fisher’s law firm $475,000 since 1992 for patent work, and the attorney was paid $30,000 to work as a consultant for the UC technology office between 1989 and 1992, last week’s audit said.

UC auditors confirmed that Wootten and Fisher had a longstanding friendship and invested $1,000 and $2,000 respectively in 1989 in Quorum-Intech Partners, a venture that failed, the audit said.

Despite that financial connection, the audit concluded that the patent chief did not have a conflict but that he influenced decisions to hire Fisher. Auditors said they could not determine whether Fisher actually controlled Wootten’s money in the partnership around the time the patent chief was getting Fisher hired as a $1,000-a-day consultant.