As I understand it, to stop this deal we need about 16.5 million shares to vote against it. My hope, and it seems to be the hope of many at SHU, is that rejection would cause the deal to have to be improved. I would be satisfied (not elated) with an improvement of about 20%, one way or another. (I agree with the recent posts of Stavros on this subject, and I suggest people look to his posts for more detail on this matter.) Should rejection simply cause the deal to fall apart completely, I still think we would be in acceptable shape waiting on our certifaction payment.
Can 16.5 million shares be convinced to vote no to this deal? I believe Phil has about 3.5 million, and we expect him to vote no. Including myself and a few others I know who are not on SHU, we have about 500,000 shares. (The vast majority of that is not me.) None of those few I know consider themselves "large shareholders," yet as I point out, we have nearly half a million shares together. Seems everyone on SHU thinks of themselves this way, but if we add it up, how many shares are represented here? If we figure this out, we then know how many "outside" shares we need to vote our way.
Rather than just complain and mourn, maybe we really can stop this deal. Let's try to figure out how many shares we have, how many more we need, and figure out ways to get them to our side (if they're not with us already). Who wants to try?
I welcome any corrections on my facts or logic.
