Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund run by Wall Street maverick David Einhorn, sued Apple over the proposal because it would remove the board's ability to issue preferred stock without shareholder authorization.
The lawsuit itself challenged a measure called Proposal No. 2 that Apple put forward, which would eliminate its power to issue preferred shares without a shareholder vote.
The company claims it came up with the idea of requiring a shareholder vote on preferred stock last May, before Einhorn began his crusade, but Einhorn raised the issue in a conference call that same month.
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Greenlight earlier this month sued to stop the vote on the proposal, which would require the company to get shareholder support before issuing preferred stock.
And what the proposal was was simply that Apple must ask for shareholder approval to issue preferred stock if it wished to do so in the future.
Last week he won a lawsuit against Apple to block it from bundling a referendum on requiring a shareholder vote before issuing preferred shares with other proposals into one vote.
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Apple's board already has the right to issue preferred stock, but it is asking shareholders at its annual meeting later this month to vote on a proposal that would require shareholder approval to issue preferred stock.
The shareholder proposal at issue sought to amend Apple's articles of incorporation in three ways, including changing language about the election of directors, setting a minimum value of Apple shares and requiring a shareholder vote before issuing preferred shares.
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The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model so successful in the 20th century is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.
However, one of the three proposals that Apple had put up for shareholder voting required that shareholder approval be necessary to issue preferred stock in the future.
Apple says the proposal does not eliminate its ability to issue preferred shares, but rather it would require a shareholder vote to do so.
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The number of shares that preferred owners could claim was huge, enough to trigger a shareholder vote on the number of authorized shares.
Apple later fired back in a statement Thursday, asserting that passage of the proposed shareholder measure wouldn't prevent Apple from issuing preferred stock in the future.
Greenlight Capital titled its preferred stock proposal iPrefs, however, the hedge fund withdrew a shareholder lawsuit surrounding the payout earlier in 2013.
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