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     119  0 Kommentare Driver Management Sets the Record Straight Following First United’s Attempts to Mislead Shareholders Ahead of 2020 Annual Meeting

    Driver Management Company LLC (“Driver”), the manager of an investment partnership that holds more than 5% of the outstanding shares of First United Corporation (NASDAQ: FUNC) (“First United” or the “Company”), today issued a letter to shareholders.

    Driver has nominated three highly-qualified, independent candidates, Michael J. Driscoll, Ed.D, Ethan C. Elzen and Lisa Narrell-Mead, for election to First United’s eleven-member Board of Directors (the “Board”) at the Company’s 2020 annual meeting of shareholders (the “Annual Meeting”). We plan to send materials showing how to vote for these new, shareholder-nominated directors on the WHITE proxy card. We invite shareholders to visit www.RenovateMyBank.com to learn more about our case for change and our nominees.

    Below is the full letter:

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    Dear Fellow Shareholders,

    We believe it is critical to set the record straight following First United’s recent effort to blatantly mislead you and mischaracterize key information about what we believe will be the most important Annual Meeting in the Company’s history.

    As we first disclosed in our preliminary proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on March 26, 2020 (the “Proxy Statement”), Driver was notified in January 2020 that the Maryland Office of the Commissioner of Financial Regulation (the “Maryland Commissioner”) had initiated an investigation into whether Driver should have filed a notice with the state regulator in advance of our fund’s purchase of First United common stock. As we also disclosed in the Proxy Statement, in February 2020, we submitted to the Maryland Commissioner a detailed explanation of why we believe that its investigation is not warranted by either fact or law, as the notice requirement was not triggered. A copy of our submission is available on our campaign website (www.RenovateMyBank.com). We encourage you to review the facts and legal analysis we presented to determine for yourselves whether the investigation into whether notice requirements were triggered by our 2019 share purchases has any merit.

    We believe it requires no great logical leap to deduce that First United requested this probe in an effort to hurt Driver and hinder our campaign for sorely-needed and long overdue boardroom change. First United’s stubborn commitment to a standalone strategy at the expense of shareholder value, its apparent knowledge of the non-public investigation, and Carissa Rodeheaver’s extensive connections with regulators from her long association with the Maryland Bankers Association lead us to conclude that the Company’s leadership or its advisers persuaded the Maryland Commissioner to initiate an investigation based on an obscure, vague, and rarely-used statute. We suspect that First United hoped the mere fact of the investigation would misleadingly cast Driver in a negative light, intimidate Driver’s independent nominees, prevent Driver from voting its shares at the upcoming Annual Meeting and, most importantly, deprive shareholders of a choice in the election of directors.

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    Driver Management Sets the Record Straight Following First United’s Attempts to Mislead Shareholders Ahead of 2020 Annual Meeting Driver Management Company LLC (“Driver”), the manager of an investment partnership that holds more than 5% of the outstanding shares of First United Corporation (NASDAQ: FUNC) (“First United” or the “Company”), today issued a letter to shareholders. …