Icahn Announces Plans to Seize Yahoo Board with Help from Mark Cuban
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Summary: As expected, Carl Icahn has sent a letter to Yahoo Chariman Roy Bostock indicating his plans to nominate an alternative board of directors, which, amongst others, includes Mark Cuban, who has been a proponent of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo since the... Click to expand...
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As expected, Carl Icahn has sent a letter to Yahoo Chariman Roy Bostock indicating his plans to nominate an alternative board of directors, which, amongst others, includes Mark Cuban, who has been a proponent of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo since the news first broke. Ironically, Cuban made his fortune when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.6 billion back at the peek of the first dot-com boom. This move paves the way for Yahoo shareholders to elect the alternative board at the company’s annual meeting, which would then set the stage for Microsoft to make a new bid to acquire the company. In the letter, Icahn discloses that he has acquired 59 million shares of Yahoo. Hence, if he’s able to get his board elected and Microsoft to re-offer $33/share, he stands to make several hundred million dollars. How’s that for motivation?
The letter has some awesomely stern-worded sound bites, including:
“It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts.”
“During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched.”
“It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.”
Here’s the full text of the letter, which also includes Icahn’s full set of board nominees:
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