SiliconBeat

The board of directors at Electronics for Imaging apparently batted 1.000 at the company’s annual meeting Friday when all the directors were reelected and all the proposals the board submitted to its shareholders for a vote passed.

But the perfect record obscured the fact that Read the rest of this entry »

Umang Gupta, the chief executive of Keynote Systems, had offered to give back an option grant good for 400,000 shares as an incentive to convince shareholders to approve a proposal to extend the company’s 1999 stock incentive plan by two years, gave back even more, according to an SEC filing today.

The measure had failed to attract enough “yes” votes Read the rest of this entry »

In an attempt to ensure shareholder approval of its postponed proposal to extend the terms of its current stock incentive plan today, Keynote System’s chief executive Umang Gupta agreed yesterday to cancel an option on 400,000 shares granted to him in November 2007.

At its shareholder meeting last week, the proposal was the only measure that failed Read the rest of this entry »

IPass, the Redwood City developer of business-mobility software that has been struggling with disgruntled investors for more than a year, now has a proxy battle on its hands with a proposal  to declassify the iPass board being made by by its third largest shareholder, Foxhill Master Fund, which wants each director to stand for election every year, rather than serving staggered three-year terms.

Foxhill is also putting forward at least three Read the rest of this entry »

Keynote Systems counted the votes on its proposal seeking shareholder approval to extend its 1999 stock incentive plan at its annual meeting today, and decided it needed more time to, presumably,  solicit additional support for the measure, according to a regulatory filing.

“As of February 27, approximately 12 million of the approximately 14.1 million outstanding shares have been voted, with approximately 48.3% of votes cast in favor of extending the Plan and approximately 51.7% against.”

The apparent rejection of the measure came despite Read the rest of this entry »

Starbucks, which wants to enact a “one-time stock option exchange” in light of its shares losing about three-quarters of their value over the last couple of years, decided to delete one sentence from its 2005 stock plan following “discussions with (shareholder advisor) RiskMetrics Group in connection with its review” of the shareholder approval it is seeking at the coffee retailer’s annual meeting next month.

You can read the offending sentence for yourself, but the gist is, Read the rest of this entry »

Advocates of having public companies allow their investors to express their opinion on the compensation packages provided to their top executives enter the 2009 proxy season with a head of steam. Read the rest of this entry »

The same day that Intel slashed more than $1 billion from its sales forecast for the current quarter, its board of directors approved revisions to the chip-maker’s Bylaws to “set forth more explicitly the processes that stockholders must follow” when they propose director nominations or proposals to be included in the company’s proxy “in light of the increased usage of more complex voting/ownership arrangements,” according to a filing it made with the SEC today.

The amendments are Read the rest of this entry »

We were getting two new tires installed a couple of weeks ago to correct the damage caused by a boneheaded maneuver on our part. The guy helping us behind the service desk was having trouble with a newly installed software program and we knew just how he felt. We’ve been migrating to a new platform ourselves here at the Mercury News.

As we commiserated about our software woes and let off some steam about the respective management “theys” that bedevil us with such “improvements”, the guy behind the counter said that a big part of the problem was that “these CEOs get paid too damn much money.”

Honest, he said that. And he didn’t know us from Adam, or where we work, or what we write about.

I thought about this encounter when I read a report today from Financial Week, which bills itself as “The Home Page of Corporate Finance”, regarding the latest efforts by activist investors Read the rest of this entry »

One of the three proxy advisory services recommended today that Cisco System stock owners vote in favor of a shareholder proposal that the company’s board of directors opposes.

The proposal, put forward by Boston Common Asset Management, requests that “the board publish a report to shareholders, within six  months, providing a summarized listing and assessment of concrete steps the company could reasonably take to Read the rest of this entry »