TO ALL: A very good friend of mine is a professional publicist. So, to keep things on a level playing field, he helped me put this out today to a "lot" of movers and shakers.
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********* NEWS...NEWS...NEWS...NEWS...NEWS **********
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Joe Antol: jantol@monmouth.com
Writer: George Whalen: scriblrr@aol.com
INTERNET-BASED STOCKHOLDER REVOLT AGAINST NOVELL MANAGEMENT FLAMES ANEW ON
BARRON'S ONLINE
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A grass-roots shareholder-revolt against the board of directors of Novell has
now erupted into a raging inferno and is spreading across the worldwide web.
The revolt features a web-based proxy solicitation to oust the Novell board,
a world's-first on the internet, according to an article posted on Barron's
Online's site after the market closed yesterday.
You are invited to read the article and participate in this historic "first"
in asserting shareholder rights via the internet!
Here's how: please go the Barron's Online electronic investor's "table of
contents" at barrons.com .
Once there, you will have no-cost access to Barron's web site, but to read
the article you'll first have to "register" by typing a "user name" and a
"password" of your choosing into an on-screen form. Thereafter, you can click
and read Lisa Goldbaum's excellent article entitled: "Novell Holders Launch
Novel Protest On The 'Net" and receive full details of this world's-first
proxy battle against the Novell board of directors!
In brief: A large and growing number of dissident Novell stockholders, fed up
with the company's prolonged under-performance and management's temporizing
in finding a new CEO, are working ad hoc on the net to oust the current
board. The aim is to replace the board with one that will focus on raising
shareholder value.
The grass-roots revolt began on the Novell "Stocktalk" message board on
Silicon Investor, a well-known web site where thousands of investors meet to
exchange information on their stocks. It is now spilling over into "The
Motley Fool" Novell stock message board on AOL.
Investor anger with the Novell director's poor performance turned to action
recently when CALPERS, a California state employee investment agency with
very large holdings of Novell shares, declared the company an
"under-performing investment." For the long-suffering shareholders, it was
the last straw!
The tech-savvy investors have created ways to submit proxies to CALPERS via
e-mail, so that CALPERS own, considerable suasion power can grow in
influencing management changes at Novell. A similar stockholder
proxy-submission has also been begun by the stockholders with the State of
Wisconsin Investment Board, which owns 8 million shares of Novell. The
dissident stockholders feel that backing these massive holders will put
muscle into their demand for changes by Novell's board of directors. The
investors also seek to block the frittering-away of the more than $1 billion
dollars in cash by Novell management, which recently said it was eyeing
acquisitions. Novell's previous acquisitions, such as WordPerfect, proved to
be disastrous for the company and its stock.
Journalists have been in the vanguard of the fray. Jesse Berst, editor of the
prestigious online publication, "Anchordesk" at ZD Net, an affiliate of PC
Week magazine, has advocated the merger of Novell with Cisco Systems. He
reported that this suggestion was rebuffed by Joe Marengi, president of
Novell, at a recent meeting.
PC Week columnist Spencer Katt has also reported the move by dissident
investors. He writes in the current issue: "The sound you hear coming out of
Provo is the furious typing of some very disgruntled Novell stockholders, who
want president Joe Marengi and the board of directors' heads on a platter."
Investors with worldwide web access can join the revolt in progress at the
Silicon Investor Novell stocktalk site, and at the Motley Fool Novell message
board.
For additional information, please contact either of the individual
stockholders listed above.
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Now, you see Mr. Troop, "anybody" can put out PR. It's not hard, and it's effective. Just ask Microsoft.
Joe... |
