WILMINGTON, Del. — IAC/ InterActiveCorp chairman Barry Diller described his partner, Liberty Media chairman John Malone, as a “nightmare,” a witness testified in the trial of a lawsuit seeking to halt Diller’s plan to break up IAC.
Victor Kaufman, IAC’s vice chairman, said Wednesday that Diller used the term to describe Malone in an e-mail to former General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch, 72, who is working as a consultant to IAC on a plan to spin off four of its companies. Douglas County-based Liberty Media owns 30 percent of IAC, an Internet and media company.
The term referred to Malone’s style of conducting “endless negotiations whenever we did a transaction with Liberty,” Kaufman told Delaware Chancery Judge Stephen Lamb.
Diller, 66, is dueling with Malone over control of the company he built with Malone’s help in 1995. Diller’s spinoff proposal, announced in November, would split IAC into five companies with a new, single-vote- per-share structure.
Liberty Media’s 30 percent stake includes shares that amount to more than 60 percent of the company’s voting rights. Diller has the right to vote those shares, except under certain circumstances, under an agreement with Malone.
Malone, 67, wants a two-tier structure to maintain his control. The dispute centers on a proxy agreement that gives Diller control of the voting rights of Liberty’s IAC shares, or 62 percent of voting power.
