A special meeting of Equity Office shareholders to vote on the Blackstone deal remains scheduled for Feb. 5 and completion of the deal is expected on or about Feb. 8, if there has been shareholder approval.
Former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget, now head of the Businessinsider.com site, was withering: "If this business [online] weren't hidden within the belly of a monstrous cash-generation engine, Windows and Office, shareholders would have long since revolted and shut it down".
"Sam got redemption," Roth said, referring to the premium paid to Equity Office's shareholders.
"Given that Rio is more of a U.K. company, with a head office and shareholder base in Britain, they would have to give up quite a lot of control in order to get Australian approval," Gidley-Kitchen said.
The same doofy Wall Street fat cat who during the financial crisis infamously spent $1.22 million to redecorate his office using shareholder money for such necessary items as a $35,000 "commode on legs" and a $1,400 "parchment waste can" not to mention lots of expensive rugs, sconces and a George IV chair has learned his lesson, these people tell me.
Many had been threatening to vote the London exchange's top executives out of office at a shareholders meeting Thursday.
On the head office move, one shareholder asked: "Which country are you likely to go to?
"There was slight hesitation in the sense that it was Mr. Fhimah's diary," Detective Bell testified, "but as I suggested to him that as Mr. Fhimah wasn't available and he was in charge of the office and a shareholder, that he had the authority to give us the diary, and he agreed".
Specifically, it just closed on $30 million in seed funding — all of it from its management team, unnamed family offices, and past shareholders who've invested in Patterson's startups and "were willing to throw into the next one," he says.
Though the company had trailed its rivals in the office sector for years, shareholders did very well in the end.
Under fire from shareholders, the office supply chain Staples said yesterday that its 13 directors would forgo making a profit on a stock conversion plan.
