Under Delaware law, majority or controlling stockholders owe fiduciary duties to the company and its minority stockholders. Under certain circumstances, however, a stockholder that owns less than 50 percent of the company’s outstanding stock can be deemed a controlling stockholder and therefore subject to the same fiduciary obligations. This determination involves a fact-intensive analysis regarding the alleged controller’s dominance of the board generally, or dominance of the corporation, board or the deciding committee with respect to a challenged transaction.

The Delaware Court of Chancery recently addressed this issue in FrontFour Capital Group v. Taube, C.A. No. 2019-0100-KSJM (March 11, 2019), where the court issued a post-trial decision on the plaintiffs’ claims to enjoin a proposed combination of Medley Management (a publicly traded asset management firm) with two corporations it advised, Medley Capital Corp. and Sierra Income Corp. (the proposed transactions). In FrontFour, the court held that twin brothers Brook and Seth Taube, who collectively owned less than 15 percent of Medley Capital’s stock, were nonetheless controlling stockholders because they exercised de facto control over the Medley Capital special committee negotiating the proposed transactions, thereby triggering entire fairness review. Although the defendants failed to show that the proposed transactions were entirely fair, the court could not order the most equitable result—a sales process free from influence and onerous deal protections—because plaintiffs failed to prove that Sierra aided and abetted the breaches of fiduciary duty. Therefore, pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision in C & J Energy Services v. City of Miami General Employees’ and Sanitation Employees’ Retirement Trust, 107 A.3d 1049 (Del. 2014), the court could not “strip an innocent third party of its contractual rights” under a merger agreement. However, the court did enjoin the stockholder vote pending corrective disclosures regarding the conflicted sales process.

Factual Background

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