Canadian TV producer Jay Firestone (Lost Girl) struck out Tuesday as he and four other Carl Icahn loyalists failed to get onto Lionsgate Entertainment’s 12-member board.
Vancouver-based Lionsgate instead saw its entire slate of 12 board nominees, including former Alliance Atlantis Communications exec Phyllis Yaffe and studio founder Frank Guistra, voted in by shareholders.
“Today’s outcome reaffirms that Lionsgate shareholders continue to have confidence in the board’s and management team’s strategy to enhance value for all Lionsgate shareholders,” the mini-studio said following its sound defeat of Icahn and his rebel slate.
The preliminary tallies on the Lionsgate shareholder vote were not available Tuesday afternoon.
The end of Icahn’s proxy battle for control of Lionsgate, at least for now, followed a New York court last week denying a move by Icahn to stop another major investor, Mark Rachesky, from voting his stake in favor of Lionsgate’s dozen board nominees.
Lionsgate managed to get all of its eleven incumbent directors into the board room for another year, with the only new nominee being Frank Guistra.
The other Lionsgate directors are Canadian entertainment lawyers Norman Bacal and Arthur Evrensel, company CEO Jon Feltheimer and vice-chairman Michael Burns, businessmen Morley Koffman, Darryl Simm and Harald Ludwig, Canadian entertainment executive G. Scott Paterson, Hardwick Simmons of Raymond James Financial, along with Yaffe and Rachesky.
Icahn isn’t likely to go away, given his 33% stake in Lionsgate. The billionaire investor promises more court battles to possibly unwind a July 20 debt-for-equity swap that handed Rachesky a key voting block at Tuesday’s annual general meeting in Los Angeles.
“We recognize that it is now virtually impossible for us to prevail in the proxy contest due to the dilutive transaction in question,” Icahn said Monday as he pulled his hostile bid for Lionsgate.