Delaware Chancery Court Judge William B. Chandler III apparently doesn’t love the idea of poison pills. A settlement he approved would make it much less expensive – and therefore much more appealing – for a company to acquire Yahoo.
Yahoo’s shareholders had been fighting for quite some time to ease or eliminate a certain set of preventative measures. A severance plan would have allowed workers who lost their jobs in the wake of a takeover to collect rather large sums of money, and there was a big question of whether employees would have been able to just quit and receive compensation, too.
Yahoo made the situation a bit simpler in December, and the details of the new accord indicate that the company’s gotten even more cooperative since then.
Bloomberg reports, “Yahoo will alter the plan to allow investors to launch proxy fights without triggering severance payments to employees, according to court papers. It also changed the terms of the plan to make it harder for workers to claim severance benefits if the company receives an offer.”
Only people at both Microsoft and Yahoo have given up on the idea of a total acquisition, of course, so it remains to be seen whether this development will affect anything. It might be that Yahoo decided to give in only because it’s no longer threatened.
