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E-MailCVS Caremark and I have reached an agreement under which the company adopted a by-law provision limiting the adoption of poison pills. The adopted by-law is based on a shareholder proposal to amend the company’s by-laws that I submitted for the company’s upcoming annual meeting. Following the agreement that the company and I reached, the company’s board adopted the new by-law earlier this week, and I withdrew my shareholder proposal. The amended by-laws of CVS, including the new section 8 of Article VI, were filed yesterday and are available here.
Under the new by-law provision, any extension of a poison pill plan not ratified by the shareholders must be approved by at least 75% of the members of the board of directors, and a pill not so extended will expire one year after its adoption or last such extension.
My shareholder proposal and the by-law adopted by CVS are based on a model by-law that was the subject of litigation and a court decision in the CA case, which led CA to abandon its attempt to exclude my proposal from the corporate ballot. An article about the litigation and my model by-law is available here.
CVS is the third company to adopt a by-law provision based on this model by-law. The adoption by CVS was preceded by an adoption by Disney, which adopted a version of my proposal after the proposal won 57% of the votes in Disney’s annual meeting, as well as an adoption by Bristol-Myers Squibb.
I commend the board of CVS for its adoption of the pill-limiting by-law. I hope that boards of other public companies will follow the example set by the boards of CVS, Disney, and Bristol-Myers and adopt similar by-law provisions.
I would like to thank the law firm of Grant & Eisenhofer for its valuable legal advice and legal representation in connection with my shareholder proposals in general and the pill by-law proposals in particular. I also wish to thank Spotlight Capital Management for advising me on engagement with companies.
