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Icahn sets his sights on Time Warner

Carl Icahn, who became one of the wealthiest US citizens through a series of hostile corporate takeovers over the past two decades, is not slowing down at age 69.

Icahn is making fresh moves, including an effort to seize control of Time Warner, the world's biggest media-entertainment company.

Born in 1936 in Queens, New York, Icahn was ranked by Forbes magazine as 24th among the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of US$8.5 billion.

Icahn studied psychology at Princeton, and worked as a stock broker before getting into securities arbitrage.

He burst on the scene of corporate raiders with his hostile takeov-er of TWA Airlines, which he headed until 1988. At the storied airline, he succeeded in cutting salary costs and breaking a strike by hiring replacement flight attendants.

One of his final acts at TWA was to strike a deal that required the airline to supply tickets at a discount to his own Internet discount agency, lowestfare.com until TWA was sold to American Airlines.

Icahn was also involved in raids of companies such as US Steel, Texaco, RJR Nabisco and General Motors.

He also owns Las Vegas' tallest casino, the Stratosphere, through his American Real Estate Partners, and has his own hedge fund.

Corporate raiders often look for companies that are undervalued or in difficulty and put pressure on the firms to cut costs or make moves to boost share value. Even if they fall short of a takeover, they can often cash out with a sizeable profit.

With his bid for Time Warner, Icahn is accusing management of incompetence in failing to bring the leading company in the sector out of slide since merger with America Online in the dot-com boom.

"Many corporate chiefs, unfortunately, are not qualified to run their companies," Icahn said in an interview with BusinessWeek last month.

They are "not concerned about being ousted for weak performance, because there's no accountability."

Icahn told CNBC he believed the board has "done the worse of all worse they could do."

He said he wants a seat on the Time Warner board and wants to oust chairman and chief executive Dick Parsons.

Icahn is showing he is capable of acting on more than one front at a time. On Friday, he made an offer for Canadian-based Fairmont Hotels and Resorts -- offering US$1.2 billion in an effort to bring up his stake from 10 percent to 51 percent.

Icahn is expect to face another fight at Fairmont, which owns more than 80 properties around the world, including some of Canada's most historic hotels. Its chief executive William Fatt called the offer "coercive."

Fatt said in a statement that Fairmont's board of directors would "strongly oppose any partial bid which is coercive by its very nature and does not treat all shareholders fairly and equally."

But Icahn said in a statement: "Fairmont and its shareholders would benefit if the company were acquired in its totality by a larger hotel operator that is able to more effectively take advantage of economies of scale."
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