Roy E. Disney suing firm for 401(k) votes

[CujoSR]

From FloridaToday.com
Former board member looking for signs of declining morale

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES -- Dissident former board member Roy E. Disney is suing The Walt Disney Co. to force the media giant to reveal how company employees voted on the re-election of Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner at last month's shareholders meeting.

Roy E. Disney and the company corresponded for several weeks on a method for revealing how employees who own stock through company retirement plans voted their shares.

The former board member and nephew of company co-founder Walt Disney wants the results so he can verify his belief a large number of company workers withheld their support from Eisner's re-election to the board -- a sign of declining morale at the company.

The company noted only about 24,000 of the company's 110,000 active employees participate in the Disney 401(k) plan.

Overall, shareholders withheld 43 percent of votes cast from Eisner's re-election to the board. Afterward, the board relieved Eisner of his chairman duties and named board member George Mitchell to the post.

In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court, Roy E. Disney objects to a demand from the company that he sign a confidentiality agreement before viewing a report showing how employees voted.

In letters to Roy E. Disney, company lawyers wrote that federal law governing retirement plans requires companies protect the identity of employee shareholders to prevent "undue coercion of participants."

"Serious issues of confidentiality have arisen and those issues need to be resolved prior to disclosure of this information, and they know that," company spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said.

Roy E. Disney said he does not wish to know how individual workers voted, but rather how participants in the company's 401(k) and other retirement plans voted as a group.