In a development that would not be out of place in the pages of “Ripley”™s Believe or Not,” Xerox Corp. has announced the return of Jeffrey Jacobson as CEO, a position he was ousted from two days earlier.
On Tuesday night, Xerox announced a settlement with activist shareholders Darwin Deason and Carl Icahn, who were seeking to block the $6.1 billion deal that would have enabled Japan”™s Fujifilm Holdings to acquire Xerox. As part of the settlement, Jacobson and six board members were to be removed from their positions. However, last night Xerox claimed that Deason failed to live up to an agreement to drop pending litigation against the company, thus allowing Xerox to void the agreement and retain Jacobson and the six board members.
“Xerox today announced that the settlement agreement it had reached with Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason on May 1, 2018 has expired in accordance with its terms,” the company said in a statement. “As previously stated, the agreement would have become effective upon execution of stipulations discontinuing the Deason litigation with respect to the Xerox defendants. In the absence of such stipulations, the agreement expired at 8 p.m. ET on May 3, 2018. As a result, the current Board of Directors and management team will remain in place.”
Deason and Icahn issued a joint statement that promised the matter would not go away anytime soon.
“The brazen self-interest of the Xerox Board defies description,” Deason and Icahn said. “Over the next few months, we intend to see that ”˜massively conflicted”™ Jeff Jacobson and old guard directors like Bob Keegan, Ann Reese and Chuck Prince, who have already done so much damage to the company, and are continuing to do more damage with these actions, are held fully and personally liable for their misconduct. Similarly, we intend to see that Fujifilm is held fully liable as an aider and abettor of the continuing breaches of fiduciary duties by those directors. We will continue our fight to rescue and revitalize Xerox, as so many of our fellow shareholders have been encouraging us to do.”
