Morning Brief: Elliott Reaches Settlement With Akamai

Elliott Management and Akamai Technologies announced a compromise agreement. Under the deal, the cloud computing giant agreed to add two independent directors, including Tom Killalea, former chief information security officer at Amazon.com, and a second director to be named at a later date. In addition, the board will form a financial operating committee that will try to identify ways to boost margins. As part of the deal, Akamai will retain a nationally-recognized consulting firm. Akamai’s board also increased its share repurchase authorization by about $417 million, to a total of $750 million. The company said it plans to use all of this amount by year-end.

“The company also intends to continue to return to shareholders a substantial percentage of free cash flow in future years,” it states in a regulatory filing. “Akamai is an outstanding company with significant potential for future growth,” stated Jesse Cohn, partner at Elliott, in a joint press release.

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Steel Partners bought more than 700,000 shares of Babcock & Wilcox for between $5.59 and $6.08 per share, boosting its stake in the power generation company to 14.8 percent, according to a regulatory filing.

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Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital Leveraged Master Fund said on Friday that it plans to nominate eight people to the board of trustees of the closed-end mutual fund Delaware Enhanced Global Dividend & Income Fund. On Thursday, Saba Capital Management called on the fund to tender for all of its shares at or close to its net asset value (NAV), liquidate the fund or convert to an open-end mutual fund.

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The HFRI Emerging Markets (Total) Index fell 1.4 percent in February, cutting the index’s gain for the year to 2.6 percent, according to HFR. Altogether, there is $230 billion invested in EM hedge funds, the data tracker said. Drilling down, the HFRI EM: Russia/Eastern Europe Index is up 5.5 percent for the year, driven by a 6.2 percent gain in January. On the other hand, the HFRI EM: China Index fell 2.7 percent in February, cutting its gain for the year to 3.2 percent.