While urging Apple shareholders to reject a proposed amendment to its charter that would eliminate the issuance of preferred stock, Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund that holds more than 1.3 million shares in the company, is also suing the tech giant over its bundling of corporate governance initiatives into a single proxy proposal.
Greenlight, an Apple shareholder since 2010, has been critical of Apple’s capital allocation strategy. In a statement, it lamented the “combination of Apple’s low (and shrinking) price to earnings multiple and $137 billion (and growing) hoard of cash on the balance sheet [roughly $145 per share].” Since May, the fund has repeatedly urged the creation of a new security, “a perpetual, high-yielding preferred stock” it claims would “unlock several hundred billion dollars of shareholder value.”
