Just when we thought things had somewhat gained a sense of normalcy, here comes another bizarre twist in the Yahoo! (YHOO) saga.
According to Kara Swisher of AllthingsD – Capital Research Global Investors, one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders — have expressed concerns about possible voting irregularities following Yahoo’s last week shareholder meeting.
On Aug 1, Yahoo shareholders showed a strong support for Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock. However, Capital Research disagrees with the outcome and believes there should have been more opposition against Yang and Bostock who respectively received 85%, 80% shareholder-vote-confidence.
Without being too speculative and only judging this latest development as it progresses, when you take a look at the unexpected high rate of approval for Yahoo’s brass, something doesn’t look right if one considers the fact — that currently, a lot of shareholders are clearly frustrated with Yahoo’s management for rejecting a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft (MSFT) that looks even sweeter with each passing day. In addition, Yang and Bostock both received more support than they did last year!!. If anything, logically — they should have received less support given where the Web portal’s stock is currently trading at, and the state of agitation the shareholder are currently in.
The investment fund notes Swisher, has approached outside vote tabulator Broadridge Financial Solutions, a N.Y. based financial services company that does securities clearing and processing, to investigate whether those votes were correctly counted.
Capital Research Global Investors Portfolio Manager Gordon Crawford has been vocal and has expressed his anger and disappointment with Yang and the board at Yahoo in the course of the negotiations with Microsoft.
Leave a Reply