Having never seen eye-to-eye with each other, fund manager Gordon Crawford, who's firm Capital Research and Management owns 6.5% of Yahoo! Inc., is -- in a sense -- picking up where Carl Icahn left off in his crusade against the Internet company's management.
Continue reading below
Icahn recently "made nice" with Yahoo! after the Internet
company agreed to seat three of his board nominees. However, Crawford,
the second-largest Yahoo! shareholder, is now rattling his saber and, according to a New York Post story,
threatening to withhold his votes for Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and
chairman Roy Bostock at Friday's shareholder meeting. As the paper
points out, the move would be largely symbolic since shareholders won't
actually be allowed to vote out any of the company-nominated candidates.
Crawford's push is an interesting one when you consider
the history between the two men. Crawford opposed Icahn's attempt to
unseat Time Warner Inc. CEO Dick Parsons and force a restructuring of the
media giant in 2006. Indeed, Crawford, a large Time Warner shareholder,
vocally disagreed with Icahn's Time Warner campaign. In 2006, Crawford told The New Yorker's Ken Auletta:
"I don't think Carl really understands the media
business," he said. "The final thing is, he doesn't understand how the
Internet works, and, in particular, how the search function is
monetized."
Of course these comments beg another question: Who is
Crawford going to vote for? After all, Icahn is expected to be one of
his three nominees with former AOL executive Jonathan Miller, and the third
remains unknown, notes our affiliate Tech Confidential. - Matthew Wurtzel
