Facing eviction?
Activists targeting Ratners
Activist investor Land & Buildings next week is expected to follow through on its threat to call for a special meeting of Forest City Realty Trust shareholders, The Post has learned.
If the hedge fund is successful in calling the meeting, it could result in all four of the Ratner family members getting ousted from the company, sources said.
The Ratner family, including Bruce Ratner, the head of the REIT’s New York office, controlled the company, which developed the New York Times Building and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, through super-voting A shares.
But under pressure from L&B, FCRT is collapsing its shares into a single class.
L&B’s Jonathan Litt in April said there was too much nepotism on the Forest Realty board — a condition, he said, that led to bad deals and a struggling stock price.
In the year ended Dec. 6 — when Forest City said it would do away with the dual-class stock structure — the REIT’s shares were down 13 percent.
Many of the company’s bad deals have been attributed to Bruce Ratner, best known for constructing the struggling Barclays Center and Pacific Park (formerly Atlantic Yards).
(The Times building has been considered a successful project.)
At present, Forest City is developing a 235,000square-foot Roosevelt Island building that will be a new campus for Cornell.
Litt believes FCRT should become truly independent of the Ratners and explore a sale.
On Friday, FCRT is holding its annual meeting, where it is expected to collapse its two groups of shares into one, moving voting control from the Ratner family to shareholders.
L&B next week will call for a special meeting, at which shareholders would vote to kick Ratner family members off the board, and likely Bruce Ratner out of the company, sources said.
FCRT’s holdings (net asset value) in February amounted to $27 a share, L&B said. FCRT shares closed Thursday at $24.13, up almost 10 percent in the last three weeks — and up sharply since Dec. 6.