Last week, on May Day no less, investors in Furniture Brands International (FBN), the furniture company whose brands include Thomasville and Broyhill, appear to have elected three directors proposed by activist investors, Sun Capital, which owns about 9.5% of FBN’s shares. Sun offered to buy the company, whose stock has declined sharply since 2002, back [...]

Until today, I had no idea that NASCAR sponsored a truck racing series (the Craftsman Truck Series). I was further puzzled as to why footwear maker Crocs, Inc. (CROX) was a sponsor of the event. Fortunately, Crocs’ latest proxy solved the Crocs - Craftsman Truck mystery.
Turns out that Crocs’ $600,000 sponsorship of Germain [...]

Mining giant Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc. (FCX) doesn’t have to keep scouring the world for new mineral properties – it’s got a juicy trough of gold that the Company’s Directors have been exploiting for years.
Near the end of the 2008 proxy FCX recently filed, there are several paragraphs describing Freeport’s “services agreement” with [...]

Each year, when Wal-Mart (WMT) files its proxy, there’s usually an interesting list of related party transactions and this year’s filing didn’t disappoint. Obviously, Wal-Mart touches a lot of different sectors of the economy and given Wal-Mart’s size it’s hard to argue that any of these deals are like the self-dealing at Krispy Kreme (KKD) [...]

Last week, Choice Hotels (CHH) filed this proxy and unlike a lot of directors who tend to take to company freebies like pigs at the trough — Al Gore’s use of Apple (AAPL) products is just one example — there’s plenty of room at the inn that Choice directors aren’t using.
The giveaways, which are [...]