In Saturday’s post on CANO, I noted that there were two strange proxy situations in the market currently. CANO was obviously one of them; the other is Cutera (CUTR). While CUTR might not have quite the same explosive headlines and drama that CANO does, I think the CUTR situation might actually be the strangest proxy situation I’ve ever seen just in terms of the board dynamics and the seemingly game of thrones style shifting alliances.
Unless they get a crazy high price, the Board cannot sell the company. That would require shareholder approval, no? And why would anyone bid knowing that shareholder approval is unlikely? Anyone bidding would need to also negotiate with the large shareholders to secure approval. The whole mess makes it very unlikely even an interested bidder would engage at this point.
It seems to me that based on the support from mgmt and other shareholders, Plants is likely to win the boardroom battle. The mgmt support may be coerced, but the support from other shareholders is not coerced. So what does that mean? Does he want this as a pet project to aggrandize himself? Or does he simply want to bring sanity to the operations and capital allocation? I often (not so humbly) think I could add a lot of value to companies simply by bringing sanity to capital allocation even though I know nothing about the business. So I'll grant that Plants can probably do this. But if he aspires to do more, this sounds like bad news, and while a great jockey cannot improve a bad horse, a bad jockey can certainly destroy a good horse.
Do you have any info on Plants other than his standard Wall Street resume? Is he a blowhard, etc.? It seems important to determine if Plants is legitimately frustrated by poor corp governance or whether he is a part of the problem seeking to become a bigger problem.
And we still have the huge about-face of Mowry to explain!?!? Was he promised a big "consulting" contract? Weird.
Big short interest in CUTR - Bloomberg has it at 28.71%
Andrew,
Unless they get a crazy high price, the Board cannot sell the company. That would require shareholder approval, no? And why would anyone bid knowing that shareholder approval is unlikely? Anyone bidding would need to also negotiate with the large shareholders to secure approval. The whole mess makes it very unlikely even an interested bidder would engage at this point.
It seems to me that based on the support from mgmt and other shareholders, Plants is likely to win the boardroom battle. The mgmt support may be coerced, but the support from other shareholders is not coerced. So what does that mean? Does he want this as a pet project to aggrandize himself? Or does he simply want to bring sanity to the operations and capital allocation? I often (not so humbly) think I could add a lot of value to companies simply by bringing sanity to capital allocation even though I know nothing about the business. So I'll grant that Plants can probably do this. But if he aspires to do more, this sounds like bad news, and while a great jockey cannot improve a bad horse, a bad jockey can certainly destroy a good horse.
Do you have any info on Plants other than his standard Wall Street resume? Is he a blowhard, etc.? It seems important to determine if Plants is legitimately frustrated by poor corp governance or whether he is a part of the problem seeking to become a bigger problem.
And we still have the huge about-face of Mowry to explain!?!? Was he promised a big "consulting" contract? Weird.
Lmao I remember doing work on CUTR for some coolsculptin thing and then realized fuck this thing it always breaks