Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Jana withdraws from field

In mid June (yes, I'm late reporting it) a group of shareholders under the leadership of JANA Partners abandoned their proxy contest against CNET, a San Francisco based website operator.

According to their filings with the SEC, JANA and ally Sandell Asset Management Corp. decided that in light of the proposed acquisition of CNET by a subsidiary of the television network CBS Corp., and the likelihood that it would go ahead regardless of any action stockholders might take, they were discontinuing their efforts.

The announcement came soon after CBS had cleared some crucial regulatory hurdles to completing the takeover.

Here's a link to an entry at the New York Times' blog, by Saul Hansell, that sought to explain the rationale for takeover.

I have no particular point to make. I've written about the JANA/CNET dispute before, and thought I'd take this opportunity to wrap up that storyline. I'm actually at the beach if you're reading this on the day it's being posted. I've figured out this neat trick blogger allows of posting automatically and a specified future date and time. I wrote these words over the holiday weekend.

That'll illustrate the extent of my techno-sophistication well enough! ;-)

No comments: