Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Carl Icahn and Southeastern Management Unveil the Dell Board They’d Like to See

Another shoe just dropped in the escalating battle over control of the struggling computer company Dell. As activist Carl Icahn said in televised comments on CNBC Friday that he would do today, he and his partners at Southeastern Management just nominated a new board of directors.

I’ll have more in a minute, but for now here’s the list of names, as taken from the letter just made public in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Icahn and Southeastern appear to have nominated six directors each.

On May 13, 2013, Longleaf Partners Fund delivered a letter to the Issuer notifying the Issuer that it intends to nominate the following six persons (the “Southeastern Nominees) as nominees to the Board of Directors of the Issuer at the Issuer’s 2013 Annual Meeting of Stockholders or any other meeting at which Directors may be elected:

Matthew C. Jones
Bernard Lanigan, Jr.
Rahul N. Merchant
Peter van Oppen
Howard Silver
David A. Willmott

In addition, the Icahn Parties (as defined herein) have informed Southeastern that the Icahn Parties intend to submit a notice to the Issuer on May 13, 2013 to nominate the following six persons (the “Icahn Nominees”) as nominees to the Board of Directors of the Issuer at the Issuer’s 2013 Annual Meeting of Stockholders or any other meeting at which Directors may be elected:

Carl C. Icahn
Harry Debes
Dr. Rajendra Singh
Gary Meyers
Daniel Ninivaggi
Jonathan Christodoro

Update: Here’s some very brief biographical information on who the are:

Lanigan is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Southeastern Management.

Merchant was last year named the first Chief Information Officer of New York City. He’s also a former CIO at Fannie Mae.

Van Oppen is a partner in Trilogy Equity Partners, a Bellevue, Wash.-based VC firm founded by former T-Mobile USA CEO Peter Stanton that specializes in wireless investments. He’s also a former CEO of Advanced Digital Information Corp., a storage company.

Silver is the former President and CEO of hotel chain Hampton Inn Equity Inns, a hotel chain that was sold to an investment fund in 2007.

Willmott is President and COO of Blount International, a manufacturer of farm and agricultural equipment based in Portland, Ore.

Carl Icahn: Activist investor, head of the Icahn Enterprises.

Debes is the former CEO of Lawson Software, now a unit of Infor.

Meyers is the CEO of a software company called FusionOps, and the former CEO of Synplicity, a company that makes software to design a type of chip known as a field programmable gate array. It’s now a part of Synopsys.

Ninivaggi is the president and CEO of Icahn Enterprises.

Christodoro is a managing director at Icahn Enterprises.

Jones is the CEO of EOS Climate, a technology and service company specializes in the management and destruction of refrigerants. Before that he was CEO of CloudShield, a cyber security outfit.

Update: I added bio information for Jones and made some corrections to the information about Silver. I also added a little more info on Merchant.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik