His name was Gerald Foss, and he had been on the Cole Industries board for eleven years.
He was sixty one, patrician, always the first to shake Nathaniel’s hand at the end of a difficult meeting and the first to suggest, gently, diplomatically, that perhaps the CEO needed to consider the board’s appetite for risk. He owned seven percent of the company.
He had been patient, James explained, laying folders across the conference table in his office, for a very long time.
“He has been accumulating stock quietly through shell companies for four years,” James said. “He now controls, indirectly, just over twenty two percent. With the seven he holds openly, he is at twenty nine. The minimum for a board vote of no confidence with enough backing is thirty.”
“He needed one more percentage point,
