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Judge OKs Settlement In Yahoo Shareholder Suit
narramissic writes "On Friday, Judge William Chandler III of the Delaware Court of Chancery approved a settlement that will roll back a Yahoo employee severance that was implemented by Yahoo's former leaders. Some investors, including the vocal Carl Icahn, described the plan as a poison pill, arguing that the severance payouts would be so expensive that no company would want to acquire Yahoo. The settlement narrows the reasons why employees can quit and receive the severance, removing some of the incentives for them to leave the company in the event of a Yahoo acquisition, whether by Microsoft or some other suitor."
And in other news, Yahoo slips further into irrelevance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"We are very pleased that the settlement was approved because we believe it is in the best interests of the company and our shareholders," the company said in a statement.
I think it really means:
"We are very pleased that the settlement was approved because we believe it is in the best interests of the executives and maybe our shareholders," the company said in a statement.
Yeah, I'm a cynical old bastard, but can you blame after what's happened in the last six months?
Nobody sane would aquire Yahoo in this sort of market. Especially after the stubborness they demonstrated when Windows was interested. Yahoo will continue to dwindle in value and relevance as it has done for the last couple years.
I was thinking that these severance agreements were supposed to be a poison pill to discourage a corporate take over.
Times they are a changin'.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
I must congratulate the P.R. team behind Icahn. The press keeps calling him "activist investor" when "corporate raider" would be a far more appropriate term...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yeah, but in honor of Bill Clinton, I used the sink.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here - as here he is - with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be - as here they are - mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be - as are they not? - ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"
How's that working out for Delaware?
Again the execs with million-dollar buyout packages and short-term traders will scrape a few more crumbs into their fat mouths off the already nearly-empty plates of the ordinary folks who actually make the company go.
s
FUCK Circuit City. Their thieving ways, spreading of lies, and consistent failure to their employees and customers is further proof of WHY a retailer must support good customer service. They wonder why their customers left them--blaming it on "poor consumer confidence"--when it was because people finally grew tired of having extended warranties and outrageously priced services crammed down their throats. GOOD RIDDANCE.
What you say would be true if stocks were valued according to expected long-term return, but they aren't. They're primarily valued circularly: based on expected value in the next 3-12 months.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If I've understood, and this is not necessarily the case, I admit, the judge has just decided that he is authorized to modify contracts in order to give financial benefit to particular groups of investors. He is effectively interfering in the market. Is that his job?
Let's imagine that I enter into an employment contract with a company, and this contract says that in certain circumstances I can leave and get a payout (let's say 12 months salary).
This payout is to compensate me for the time it will take for me to find another job. The cost and risk in known up front to both parties; the company and me. The contract is signed by authorised signatories of the company, who get this authorisation from the directors, who ultimately are authorised by the shareholders to make decisions about hiring and compensation policy.
Now along comes a judge, who says "I think that this contract is detrimental to the share price, ergo detrimental to the finances of certain shareholders; I have decided to unilaterally modify or annul this contract as I see fit".
The judge is appointing himself to be a kind of super-president of the company: not elected to the board by shareholders, but with some kind of moral right to interfere in the company's policies and practises.
Please feel free to correct me if I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, but from reading TFA, that is my interpretation.
K.
There are some people (not to mention any names), including some iconic people, who need to be dumped into the wilderness wit nothing but a pair of briefs and a knife, to find out what it's really like when the wolves get ahold of the little guy.
I think the argument for this would be that since the shareholders did fire the board that made the deal the judge considers the act of signing the contract something done agains't the will of the owners/shareholders and has taken it upon himself to reverse this.
Think of it in another way, what if the CEO/Chairman of a listed company would transfer all the funds of that company into his own account. He did have authority to access the accounts, but the act itself would certainly be considered theft.