Three quick notes

1. Melnyk's astonishment

Let's just try to keep up today with three of our continuing stories. As I reported month, there was a shake-up at the Canadian pharma company Biovail. The company is doing its best to disassociate itself from its founder, Eugene Melnyk, whom it blames for a roster of legal troubles. This is tricky, because Melnyk remains the largest shareholder, with just under 12% of the equity.

And he isn't a happy camper. Indeed, in a letter to the reconstituted board of his old company, dated May 8, he professes himself astonished by the latest measures in this continuing distancing.

He is "very concerned about the circumstances surrounding the entering into of the employment agreements with senior management and the change in control provisions in those agreements. I intend to pursue this matter further."

He can pursue it on June 25, the day of the annual shareholders' meeting. The "record date" for the meeting is April 28 -- i.e. you'd need to have been a shareholder "of record" by then to be qualified to vote.

2. More from Ben Stein

You remember Ben Stein? I last wrote about him in January, when he used his New York Times column to set out a theory of "trader realism," i.e. that the whims and machinations of speculators in Manhattan or London are so important to pricing of strategic commodities that they render the fundamentals ("supply," and "demand" and other stuff and nonsense) essentially irrelevant.

This is a lunatic theory, and since then Stein has shown signs of abandoning it for a cause even dearer to his heart -- "biologist realism" linked here.

But watch out economics. Stein, like a poltergeist, is baaa-ack.

Felix Salmon does him justice.


3. The latest at CSX

The feud between railroad company CSX and activist investor TCI continues, pending some resolution at next month's meeting.

TCI has posted a white paper titled "CSX: The Case for Change," it claims that numerous opportunities for productivity improvements could add $2.2 billion to annual earnings within five years, and it complains that the incumbents ()the folks who have left those opportunities unexploited) have also awarded themselves the highest pay packages in the industry.

Yesterday, TCI sent out a "dear shareholders'" letter asking its fellow investors to go to their website and check out that white paper.