I don't have any knowledge of that so I can't comment on it. Perhaps we could hear David's side of the story (there are ALWAYS two sides). John showed me the complete email exchange between himself and David.
At any rate, you stated that David did a good job as editor - I can certainly explore that. From my perspective, his decision re: JVP was a bad one....and I truly felt at the time that by later in the year, the quality of FT continued to decline.