Shareholders of Samsung C&T, a unit of South Korea's Samsung conglomerate, approved a merger with Cheil Industries, Samsung's de facto holding company. Activist hedge fund Elliott Associates LP, which owns 7.12% of Samsung C&T, had campaigned against the deal.
A Bloomberg report
noted that 69.5% of the votes were cast in favor of the merger, only about 2.9 percentage points above the two-thirds majority needed to approve the deal.
The
New York Times
' “DealBook” column
said Elliott “argued that Cheil's $8 billion takeover of Samsung C&T hurt minority shareholders by grossly undervaluing Samsung C&T in an unlawful attempt to help Lee Jae-yong, the son of Samsung's chairman, Lee Kun-hee, inherit leadership of the conglomerate.”
The
Times
article said that in its appeals to shareholders, “Samsung depicted Elliott as a foreign vulture capitalist whose purported activism it said had been timed to disrupt an orderly generational change at Samsung, the crown jewel of the South Korean economy, make a quick profit and exit.”
Fortune
, along with other news accounts, reported that blogs supporting Samsung published anti-semitic slurs against Paul Elliott Singer, founder of Elliott Associates. Samsung said “it ‘denounced' anti-semitism and said it had pulled all advertising from Media Pen, the blog leading the attacks,”
the
Fortune
article said.
Lee Jisoo, an attorney at Law & Business Research Center, told Bloomberg, “Elliott's unexpected attack must have been a big surprise for Samsung, the battle may slow other potential deals planned by the group and management will give it a second thought now.” (Sources: Bloomberg, July 17, 2015; “DealBook,”
New York Times
, July 17,2015;
Fortune
, July 17, 2015.)
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