While there are many areas of appraisal up for debate, and actively being debated in the Delaware courts, sometimes there’s an easy one. When a company engages in a merger, under the DGCL, the Company must timely notify shareholders of their appraisal rights if those rights exist. What a company cannot do – as its
The press release by Arca Capital, which previously announced it is pursuing appraisal with respect to AmTrust Financial, highlights a basic question in appraisal: How public are the proceedings?
As an initial matter, you do not need to be as public as Arca. The appraisal process starts with a series of letters to ‘perfect’
Although Delaware dominates when it comes to appraisal (as a result of its outsize attractiveness to U.S. companies as a place of incorporation), appraisal is not limited to the First State. As we’ve previously discussed, appraisal regimes also exist in other states including Massachusetts, Arizona, and Nevada. What about the Hawkeye State?
In April 2018, shareholders of Dr. Pepper filed a lawsuit challenging a merger with Keurig – a deal they called convoluted and which was allegedly designed to deny them appraisal rights. One particular branch of that challenge, that the deal itself actually should have carried appraisal rights, was decided in June 2018 against the
The Corporate Council of the Corporation Law Section of the Delaware State Bar Association has put out proposed amendments to Delaware law, including a technical change to Section 262, the statutory basis for Delaware appraisal. Richards Layton, a Delaware law firm, summarizes the proposed amendment:
The proposed amendments would amend Section 262(b) of the
If a company structures a merger to avoid appraisal rights, does a shareholder have no recourse? That question will no doubt be part of the debate as City of North Miami Beach v. Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Inc. is litigated. In a complaint filed in Delaware Chancery court on March 28, 2018, plaintiffs, a putative
In this post by Professor Afra Afsharipour of the UC Davis School of Law, she discussed what she identifies as the bidder overpayment problem, where bidders often pay more for publicly traded targets due to managerial agency costs and behavioral biases. The article notes that there are less monitoring mechanisms for bidder shareholders than there
The New York Law Journal recently ran an article, Looking Beyond Delaware: Exercising Shareholder Appraisal Rights in N.Y. [via ALM], which analyzes the New York appraisal statute and observes that while appraisal litigation has remained underutilized outside of Delaware, it is possible that with the uptick in Delaware appraisal New York will see more appraisal
In a March 2016 working paper, Corporate Darwinism: Disciplining Managers in a World With Weak Shareholder Litigation, Professors James D. Cox and Randall S. Thomas detail several recent legislative and judicial actions that potentially restrict the efficacy of shareholder acquisition-oriented class actions to control corporate managerial agency costs. The authors then discuss new corporate
The so-called market-out exception precludes appraisal where the target’s stock trades in a highly liquid market. In other words, appraisal is normally available to shareholders except, as the rationale goes, where the M&A target’s stock trades in such a liquid, highly efficient market that its stock price naturally reflects its fair value, and any