Chairman John Malone was not present at his company’s annual meeting Friday.
Shareholders of Douglas County-based Liberty Media Corp. met this morning, ratifying members of the board of directors and independent auditors. The official meeting took about five minutes.
Malone was with a family member having a medical procedure, said company president and CEO Greg Maffei, who conducted the meeting. He said it was the first time in 36 years that Malone missed an annual meeting.
Maffei said that Liberty had a busy year, and talked about the company’s various holdings, and leaned towards increasing investment in certain holdings.
He said that Liberty is “bullish” on DirecTV, in which it now holds a 48 percent stake — up from 41 percent when completed it stock-for-asset swap with News Corp. earlier this year.
“We’re likely to increase our stake to over 50 percent,” Maffei said.
He said that telecommunications companies such as AT&T might have an interest in acquiring DirecTV, because they “don’t have a lot of other options” when it comes to offering pay TV service. But he said Liberty wasn’t interested in giving up its newly-acquired asset.
As for Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp., which successfully won a ruling against Liberty in March to split into five separate companies, Maffei said that Liberty received more representation on the boards of the four spinout companies.
“We will look at the businesses to see if we’d like to increase our ownership,” he said.
Earlier this week, a report by Proxy Governance — a firm that offers research and proxy voting recommendations on public companies — suggested that shareholders vote against directors up for re-election on the board’s compensation committee because of Malone’s compensation package.
“Benefits to which Malone would become entitled in the event of termination of employment for any reason are quite excessive – totally approximately $120 million,” said Proxy Governance in a statement.
Maffei dismissed those claims, pointing out that Malone agreed to defer his regular salary back in the late 1970s. Malone salary is $2,600, although he also receives option awards and other benefits.
“It’s a gross mischaracterization,” Maffei said. “It’s his money. To point to someone’s compensation package as severance… it was kind of unfair.”
Kimberly S. Johnson: 303-954-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com
