Investor tries to unseat three
Claims are aimed at Weatherford’s board members
One of Weatherford International’s largest investors is attempting to unseat three members of the board of directors of the troubled Houston-based oil field service company.
New York investment management firm and activist investor D.E. Shaw Group, which holds Weatherford’s bonds and 3.5 percent of the company’s shares, said Monday it will try to remove Weatherford board Chairman Thomas Bates and members John Glick and Gordon Hall at the company’s shareholder meeting June 12.
D.E. Shaw alleges that Bates, Glick and Hall “may not be acting in the company’s or its stakeholders’ best interests.” The management firm would not elaborate.
“While this is an uncontested election, the company’s articles require any director who receives a greater number of votes ‘against’ than votes ‘for’ to tender his or her resignation,” D.E. Shaw said in a statement.
Weatherford officials defended the nominations of Bates, Glick and Hall to the seven-member board.
“Against the challenging macro environment, we have taken important actions to reduce costs and preserve liquidity,” the company said in a statement. “We have done and will continue to do what we believe is in the best interest of the company. We respect the views of all our shareholders, but disagree with D.E. Shaw’s position and intend to engage directly with our shareholders with regard to the annual meeting.”
With decades of experi
ence in the oil and natural gas industry, Bates, Glick and Hall joined Weatherford’s board after the company emerged from bankruptcy in December.
Under the company’s articles of association, the board is made up of the CEO and six independent members who can serve one-year terms for up to 10 years.
After almost six years of struggling to adapt to stubbornly low oil prices, Weatherford filed for bankruptcy in July 2019 and posted a $5.3 billion profit during the fourth quarter of 2019, the company’s first profit since the third quarter of 2014.
But the company lost $966 million in the first quarter of 2020 as revenue declined by 10 percent to $1.2 billion compared with $1.3 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.
Weatherford is the second energy company to have its board come under attack in recent months. Houston-based Occidental, facing mounting financial troubles less than a year after its $38 billion purchase of Anadarko, was the target of activist investor Carl Icahn, who last week won three seats on the Oxy board. Icahn, Occidental’s second-largest shareholder, was a vocal opponent of the Anadarko purchase.