Yahoo! Inc.'s (NASDAQ: YHOO) move to delay its annual shareholder meeting from July 3 to a still undetermined date later that month could not only buy it some time against activist investor Carl Icahn, who wants to oust the company's existing board, but may leave Icahn in a costly bind.
TechTicker reported Friday that Icahn could face losses of "hundreds of millions, if not billions" if his 49 million share option position in Yahoo! expired before the shareholder meeting (Icahn hasn't disclosed when his options are due to expire). Icahn, who has criticized Yahoo! for rejecting Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) $47.5 billion takeover bid, is trying to nominate his own slate of directors to Yahoo!'s board. As expected, Yahoo! announced Thursday afternoon the nomination of nine of its 10 existing board members for re-election. The company said its 10th board member Edward Kozel had been planning to leave since early in the year but stayed on to see the company through the Microsoft talks.
While Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang remains under pressure to restore the value lost after the talks with Microsoft broke down, Microsoft now also finds itself in a potentially awkward position, following comments by CEO Steve Ballmer in Moscow. Ballmer was quoted as saying, rather inexplicably, "Yahoo! was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business."
