Siemens AG withdrew its backing for Chief Executive Officer Olaf Berlien of Osram Licht AG, bringing to a head a long-festering dispute about the strategy of its former lighting unit.
Siemens used Osram’s annual shareholder meeting in Munich on Tuesday to criticize Berlien’s performance last year. In a procedural move, Siemens lawyer Christian Bleiweiss told shareholders the steering of a change in strategic direction unveiled in November by Berlien was inadequate and said Siemens would vote against his actions.
Osram shares rose as much as 8 percent and were trading 6.8 percent higher at 41.185 euros as of 14:05 p.m. in Frankfurt. About 1.2 million shares were traded, more than double the three-month daily average.
The challenge by Europe’s biggest engineering company focuses on Berlien and spares his finance head Klaus Patzak, Osram’s only other management board member. Berlien has presided over a 30 percent decline in the share price since the shift in strategy, which some investors said exposed the world’s second-biggest lighting maker to less profitable end markets.
Siemens’s lawyer on Tuesday demanded that the annual vote to ratify the decisions made by the whole board last year be exceptionally split into separate votes for each manager.
Criticism Met With Applause
A CEO must “carefully direct a company’s actions while keeping in mind its further development and investors’ interests,” Bleiweiss said. “This was not sufficiently the case” at Osram, he added to applause from sections of the auditorium in the convention center where the meeting was being held.
See entire article at Bloomberg.com: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-16/osram-jumps-after-siemens-proposes-separate-votes-on-ceo-cfo?cmpid=yhoo.headline
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