San Diego’s Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPB]]), which is in a standoff with a Ramius Group fund over its buyout offer, disclosed in a regulatory filing today that one of its independent directors has resigned from its eight-member board.
The company, which yesterday reiterated its rejection of Ramius’ $160 million buyout offer, maintains that Jean-Pierre Millon “continues to support the Board of Directors and its decision to reject Ramius’ unsolicited, non-binding proposal” to acquire Cypress at $4 a share. Nevertheless, Roth Capital Partners analyst Scott Henry told The San Diego U-T “this is a a ‘no’ vote against what they are doing.”
It’s also telling that Cypress released a copy of its Aug. 17 rejection letter to Ramius in a news release yesterday, but did not issue a press release about Millon’s resignation today. The company only disclosed Millon’s resignation in today’s regulatory filing.
Cypress maintains in its filing that Millon also “has been and continues to be supportive of the Company’s current strategy to develop a portfolio of CNS drug candidates, and resigned from the Board of Directors due to a difference of opinion with respect to the timing of the execution of the strategy.”
A spokesman for New York-based Ramius Value and Opportunity Advisors declined to comment this evening.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow