SiliconBeat

Here’s another dispatch from Mercury News reporter Elise Ackerman, who has been covering the Yahoo saga for us. She’s been examining some materials related to the shareholder litigation brought about regarding Microsoft’s proposed takeover:

Now that the Yahoo shareholder meeting is over and Carl Icahn has been appointed to Yahoo’s board of directors he will be working to rescind severance plans adopted by the board’s compensation committee on February 12 , 2008.

According to a declaration filed in Delaware Court by John Fox, a veteran Silicon Valley employment attorney, the plans were highly unusual. Read the rest of this entry »

Shares of Asyst Technologies shot up 28.6 percent, or $1.12, to $5.03 Wednesday after the company revealed that it’s board is mulling over another offer to buy the maker of chip-making equipment.

The offer came from Aquest Systems, a company headed Mihir Parikh, an Asyst founder and former chief executive who in 2003 alleged Read the rest of this entry »

Asyst Technologies, the Fremont chip-making equipment manufacturer, said that it received word that a hedge fund run by Bryant Riley intends to nominate its own slate of six directors to “in an attempt to gain control of Asyst’s Board of Directors,” according to a press release put out by Asyst Wednesday afternoon. If elected, the new directors “intend to sell (Asyst) through an auction process” according to the release. Read the rest of this entry »

We were going to start this post, “If at first you don’t succeed…,” then realized the aphorism didn’t quite fit.

For the second year in a row, shareholders at Ultratech, the San Jose supplier of chip-making equipment, will vote on a proposal at its annual meeting next month to change how the company’s board of directors is elected. Currently, elections are staggered, with half of the board standing for election each year, also known as the classified system. The proposal asks to declassify the board by having all directors face election every year.

The problem is, Read the rest of this entry »

Rackable Systems, the Milpitas maker of energy-efficient servers used in data centers, said earlier this week that results from its shareholder meeting late last month show that it prevailed over dissident shareholder Richard Leza.

Leza was so incensed by the compensation doled out by the board over the last year — including stock-based pay for the company’s new chief executive valued at nearly $13million — that he invested a good deal of his own time and money to wage a proxy battle tohave himself and another outside candidate elected to Rackable’s board, and to pass a proposal he made to give shareholders an opportunity each year approve the top executive’s pay. Read the rest of this entry »