Dow Jones does not need higher Murdoch bid: Ottaway

[gravity]

Source: Reuters

By Robert MacMillan

NEW PALTZ, New York (Reuters) - More than 200 e-mail messages awaited Jim Ottaway last weekend. Instead, he spent some time reading the Odyssey -- in ancient Greek.

Ottaway, who controls more than 6 percent of Dow Jones & Co. Inc.'s (DJ.N: Quote, Profile, Research voting shares, has been in high demand after he publicly rejected Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion bid for the company in the pages of its flagship, The Wall Street Journal.

Journalism purists cheered and the financial community reacted with slack-jawed surprise at the notion that anyone would refuse that kind of money. At $60 per share, Murdoch's offer represented a stratospheric 65 percent premium to Dow Jones' stock price when the bid was disclosed late last month.
Reuters Pictures

"We're not trying to get another $2 a share. We don't want to sell to Murdoch for $75 a share," Ottaway, 69, told Reuters over lunch at a Greek-run diner in New Paltz, a small college town 85 miles from New York City in the Hudson River valley.

"It's the principle, not the price .... It's the person, not the price," he said in an interview earlier this week.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN2317829620070524?src=052507_0943_FEATURES_blogs

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This is breaking news. Someone actually cares more about journalistic integrity than profits.

[Kagemusha]

1. Well? Does the law allow him to stand up for principle?

Or is saying it's the person not the price going to get the courts to remove him and force the company to be sold precisely because he spoke those words?

[Randomthought]

2. Remove him from where?

If you continue reading
"Ottaway left Dow Jones as senior vice president in 2003 and quit the board in 2006, but remains influential as he and his immediate family control 6.2 percent of its Class B stock, which give them more power than ordinary Class A shareholders."

It's his stock he doesn't have to sell.

[Kagemusha]

3. My mistake, I thought he was a target of a shareholder lawsuit.

Apparently that would be other people close to him but not him individually. If he was speaking in the capacity of a corporate officer and seeking something other than the shareholder interest in a high stock price it would come up in a courtroom on those grounds alone, I would think.

[rcdean]

4. This guy sounds great!

Hell of a man to turn down this much profit on principle, to speak publicly of it, and to tell Rupert where to go in such a way that he looks forward to the trip.