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Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer will resign from the company’s board of directors once its planned $4.8 billion merger with Verizon Communications Inc. is completed.
Meanwhile, what’s left of Yahoo will be renamed Altaba Inc., according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier today. Mayer, together with Yahoo’s co-founder David Filo and four other board members, will step down once the deal has closed, the company said.
The deal will see Verizon acquire Yahoo’s Internet businesses, while the remainder of the company, which consists of its stake in China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo Japan, will operate as a new investment firm.
What isn’t clear yet is if Mayer will also depart from Verizon itself. Soon after the deal was first announced, Mayer insisted that she wasn’t going anywhere. However, reports have also emerged that she could receive up to $55 million as part of any severance package if she does decide to quit the company.
Verizon announced its plans to acquire Yahoo for $4.8 billion last year, but the deal has since been complicated by the news that Yahoo was hacked not once, but twice, in the last few years, with more than 1.5 billion user accounts compromised in the two incidents. Those revelations led to reports that Verizon might be considering backing out of the deal, or at least asking for a substantial discount on the original price.
Today’s news does not seem to be any official confirmation that the deal will go ahead, however. In its filing, Yahoo notes “risks that Verizon may assert, or threaten to assert, rights or claims with respect to the Stock Purchase Agreement as a result of facts relating to the security incidents disclosed on September 22, 2016 and December 14, 2016 and may seek to terminate the Stock Purchase Agreement or renegotiate the terms of the Sale Transaction on that basis.”
As such, it looks like we’ll have to wait until Yahoo reports its financial results in the next few weeks to see what kind of impact those security breaches may have had on the proposed deal.
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