Boardroom

Yahoo and activist investor Carl Icahn have reached a settlement in their bitter battle over control of the company. The two sides have agreed to keep most of the current Yahoo board on the ballot for re-election and to create three new board positions: one for Icahn and two for executives of his re...

The punches are starting to fly fast as Yahoo and Carl Icahn duke it out over the company's future. Yahoo shot down a new offer by Microsoft over the weekend to buy the search portion of its business and leave the remaining pieces under Icahn's control. Now, Icahn and the current board of directors ...

Since the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley on July 30, 2002, many executives and board members have developed an almost palpable degree of anxiety when it comes to corporate governance and board service. In fact, some friends of mine who have been asked to serve on boards of publicly held companies have ...

The ground battle in the proxy war between Carl Icahn and Yahoo has begun in earnest, with Yahoo directly urging shareholders to back the board's slate of directors and ignore Icahn's pleas for change. Yahoo filed a copy of the proxy solicitation notice it sent to shareholders with the Securities an...

Carl Icahn's bid to change the corporate direction at Yahoo -- specifically to push it into the arms of Microsoft -- got an unexpected boost this week when a judge ordered court documents in a shareholder lawsuit unsealed. The revelations and accusations in those papers, including that Yahoo turned ...

The current economy in the U.S. has put tremendous strain on many companies, particularly startups. Usually, our firm gets very few inquiries from companies that are facing bankruptcy and are looking for strategies, options and alternatives to bankruptcy. Lately, however, that seems to have changed....

"Quit while you're ahead" is one nugget of conventional wisdom that few CEOs appear to heed, at least judging by the number of executives who have left companies at the behest of shareholders -- or, worse, regulators. Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, however, appears to be an exception. Sarin, who has been ...

Yahoo has postponed its annual shareholders' meeting, which had been originally scheduled to take place on July 3. Now, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that meeting will take place at the end of July in order to give regulators time to review paperwork related...

The recent fall and near collapse of Bear Stearns has been breathtaking. What has caused this once great company to flirt with becoming a penny stock? Will there be stockholders' suits for this remarkable collapse of value? Management of Bear Stearns decided to ride the mortgage-backed securities bo...

An unlikely savior could bring Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo back from the grave. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn may be mulling a proxy battle to replace the Web portal's board with one that's more friendly toward a Microsoft purchase. Icahn has not publicly stated his intentions, but he has acc...

Circuit City will allow Blockbuster and its largest shareholder, Carl Icahn, to look into the company's finances in connection with the video rental company's proposed buyout offer. Circuit City also revealed that it has hired Goldman Sachs to help the company look into strategic alternatives to bui...

Chief executive officers worldwide believe major change is coming to the global economy and their businesses, according to IBM's biennial study of CEOs. The executives are are also eager to find ways to keep happy consumers who are increasingly information-savvy and who expect the businesses they bu...

The collapse of this weekend's negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo looked like game over. When the news first broke that Microsoft was walking away from its $44 billion bid, it seemed as though Redmond was the loser: It had tried a high-stakes, high-profile acquisition gambit and failed. Its d...

The average compensation for an S&P 500 company's CEO was US$14.2 million in 2007, according to the AFL-CIO's 2007 Trends in CEO Pay survey. Some CEOs are even compensated multiple times that amount. This raises the question: When is executive compensation too high? One might also ask, are direc...

A closely watched meeting of the Microsoft board of directors has reportedly ended with CEO Steve Ballmer given the authorization -- and possibly the extra cash -- needed to do what it takes to get the Yahoo acquisition done or decide to drop it. Microsoft's board met Wednesday evening in Redmond, W...