Ardent Leisure's capitulation: the biggest win by activist investors in decades

The Ardent shareholder activist campaign carries important lessons for other activists as well as for boards of directors and their corporate advisers. This was the largest successful activist campaign in Australia for decades.
The campaign, which was spearheaded by Weiss and property investor Kevin Seymour, started with the right message to other shareholders when Weiss and Seymour invested about $100 million in the target company, Tony Boyd of Financial Review wrote on September 4th.

An important reason for the success of the activist campaign was strong shareholder engagement: Weiss employed Maria Leftakis, Morrow Sodali, to engage with retail and institutional shareholders. This engagement process gave the activists an edge over the incumbent board, which assumed retail shareholders would blindly follow their recommendation not to vote in favour of Weiss or Richmond.

Read the entire Financial Review's article by downloading the attachement below.