Cellnex continues to purge its top table

Former Cellnex Chairman Bertrand Kan has been shown the door in a further sign that activist investor TCI is now calling the shots at the Spanish towers giant.

Kan is joined in his departure by fellow board member Peter Shore, both of whom have suddenly resigned, we’re told. They were two of the three board members identified as liabilities by TCI Fund Management founder Christopher Hohn in a public letter last week. The third, Alexandra Reich, has survived the latest purge. TCI is Cellnex’s biggest single shareholder and pressure from Hohn appeared to be the catalyst for Kan to be replaced as Chair by Anne Bouverot.

“On behalf of the Board of Cellnex I would like to express our gratitude and appreciation for these 8 years of commitment and dedication to the Cellnex project,” said Bouverot in the press release announcing their departure. “Bertrand and Peter have played a key role in this amazing journey since our IPO in 2015. This has been an industrial transformation with few parallels in Europe. Cellnex pioneered the model of shared telecom infrastructure in Europe, a concept which was in its infancy 8 years ago and has now become firmly established in Europe with clear leadership from Cellnex.”

Kan and Shore made the following joint statement. “It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to work with such a talented team of people and to have had a part in making Cellnex what it has become.  Its acquisitions, financings, organisation and more recent strategic pivot have culminated in a truly unique, focused European infrastructure business. We wish the company the very best for the future.”

But Reuters, among others, received supplementary statements talking of “irreconcilable differences” and that sort of thing. Those will largely concern the strategic direction of the company and are probably similar to the ones that led the CEO to throw in the towel at the start of this year. In fact, the failure to find his replacement is TCI’s only publicly stated criticism of the board, but Hohn presumably has other gripes.

Hohn, who is not short of a bob or two, seems to be a classic of the activist investor genre, having already this year called for Alphabet to get rid of a fifth of its workforce and successfully warned Airbus off an investment he didn’t like the look of. He presumably only wants a Cellnex CEO that will execute whatever cunning plan he has for increasing the company’s share price and, on current evidence, seems likely to get his own way once more.

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