We'd like to be hiding under the dessert cart when Carl Icahn sits down to dinner with Forest Laboratories CEO Howard Solomon. The rabble-rousing activist investor has spent the last several months throwing knives at Solomon, and Solomon hasn't been shy about wielding his own blades.
Now that Icahn's second proxy battle with Forest has come to an end, he and Solomon plan to dine together. Or so he tells CNBC, where he claimed to be pleased to win only one of the four board seats he sought. Whether the two adversaries will check their weapons at the door--and keep sharp knives off the table--wasn't addressed.
But now that Icahn captured his one and only seat on Forest's board, Solomon may be feeling magnanimous. Or perhaps he'd simply enjoy saying, "I told you so." After all, Forest offered up one directorship to settle the whole proxy fight ahead of time.
Icahn seems to be in a conciliatory mood, too. "Basically I think the company has great potential," he told the network, adding that his campaign to boost Forest's profitability can be an amicable one. "There's peace and then there's war. We don't need war." What a difference a few days--and a shareholder vote--can make.
- read the CNBC story
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