The largest shareholder in the software maker Computer Associates said he would support the company's management against a proxy fight for control of the board, dealing a serious blow to the fight's leader, the Texas billionaire Sam Wyly.
Walter Haefner, a Swiss billionaire who controls 21 percent of Computer Associates (CA), which is based in Islandia, NewYork, wrote a letter to Wyly late last week in which he said: "I have complete confidence in the existing CA management team and intend to support them fully. Please try to understand, Sam, after what Charles Wang and CA have done for me, I simply will not act otherwise."
Haefner's letter, dated Friday, came in response to a letter that Wyly had written to him seeking support for the proxy fight, which Wyly announced on Thursday. Wyly's letter said that if he did not have the support of Haefner, he would not have "a lot of motivation for spending the time, energy, money and almost inevitable public verbal battling which comes with a contested election and which I find distasteful at best."
Wyly is not trying to buy Computer Associates from its shareholders. Instead, he has asked them to elect a new board that would elect him as the company's chairman. He argues that Computer Associates' current management has alienated employees and angered customers. The company has also badly underperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index as well as other big software companies since 1996, he says.
The board of Computer Associates was planning to have a regularly scheduled board meeting yesterday. Executives close to the company said the main subject of discussion on the agenda was Wyly's maneuverings.
The board is also planning to approve the appointments of two new board members: Linus Cheung, the former chief executive of Hong Kong Telecom, and Louis Ranieri, the former vice chairman of Salomon Smith Barney.
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