The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [590]
9. CalPERS also opposed the election of Herbert Allen, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, and Don Keough because of their business relationships with the company.
10. Herbert Allen, “Conflict-Cola,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2004.
11. Excerpts from a survey of corporate board members conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, as reported in Corporate Board Member, November/December 2004. PWC identified no comments or sentiment against Buffett.
12. Deborah Brewster, Simon London, “CalPERS Chief Relaxes in the Eye of the Storm,” Financial Times, June 2, 2004.
13. Interview with Don Graham.
14. “Coke Shareholders Urged to Withhold Votes for Buffett,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, April 9, 2004.
15. In “The Rise of Independent Directors in the U.S., 1950–2005: Of Shareholder Value and Stock Market Prices” (Stanford Law Review, April 2007), Jeffrey N. Gordon concludes, “One of the apparent puzzles in the empirical corporate governance literature is the lack of correlation between the presence of independent directors and the firm’s economic performance. Various studies have searched in vain for an economically significant effect on the overall performance of the firm.”
16. This issue was resolved through a consent decree on April 18, 2005, in which the company did not pay a fine or admit wrongdoing but promised to clean up its internal audit, compliance, and disclosure systems.
17. The GMP International Union, which also spoke at the meeting.
18. Transcript, Coca-Cola shareholder meeting 2004, courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company; Adam Levy and Steve Matthews, “Coke’s World of Woes,” Bloomberg Markets, July 2004; interviews with several directors and company employees.
19. Transcript, Coca-Cola shareholder meeting 2004, courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company.
20. Adam Levy and Steve Matthews, “Coke’s World of Woes.” The New York Times blasted Coke over severance payments to Heyer and other executives in “Another Coke Classic,” June 16, 2004. The criticism was not universal; the Economist said Isdell was “welcomed by investors and analysts as a safe pair of hands” (“From Old Bottles,” May 8, 2004).
21. For example, Constance L. Hays, in The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (New York: Random House, 2004), makes this inference.
Chapter 61
1. Interview with Tom Newman.
2. Interview with Kathleen Cole.
3. Ibid.
4. The author, too, has for some years sat in the managers’ section, although she is not a shareholder.
5. This dinner, which was hosted by Morgan Stanley at the time, subsequently became a private event hosted by the author.
6. Courtesy Paul Wachter, producer, Oak Productions.
7. Tom Strobhar, “Report on B-H Shareholder Meeting,” Human Life International, May 2004; “Special Report, HLI Embarrasses Warren Buffett in Front of 14,000 Stockholders,” July 2004. Mr. Strobhar has a curious history. After serving as a leader in the boycott against Berkshire that resulted in canceling the shareholder-contributions program, he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “Giving Until It Hurts” (August 1, 2003), criticizing the shareholder-contributions program for being a clandestine way of “paying” Buffett (Notwithstanding that Berkshire made no corporate charitable contributions nor paid a dividend). Strobhar identified himself only as the president of an investment firm in Dayton, Ohio, omitting his role in the boycott and the fact that he was chairman of Life Decisions International. Strobhar went on in 2005 to found Citizen Action Now, an organization designed to fight “the homosexual agenda” and for “an America free from the manipulation of homosexual groups.” On the website of his investment firm, he borrows Buffett’s reputation by advertising himself (as of November 2007) as “trained in the tradition of Ben Graham, the ‘father of security