By: Christopher Grimes, Harriet Agnew, Anna Nicolaou, Ortenca Aliaj
Activist hedge fund Trian Partners plans to nominate two candidates to Walt Disney’s board of directors, intensifying a campaign against the media group that is expected to be one of the most contested proxy battles in years. Trian will put forward its co-founder Nelson Peltz and former Disney executive Jay Rasulo at the company’s annual shareholder meeting next year, it said on Thursday. “The root cause of Disney’s underperformance, in our view, is a board that is too closely connected to a long-tenured [chief executive] and too disconnected from shareholders’ interests,” Trian wrote in a statement.