‘Unethical’ Antics Precede Green Dot’s Annual Meeting

Green Dot has a red bullseye on its corporate back. Harvest Capital is, yet again, firing salvos at the firm ahead of the annual Green Dot meeting slated for later this month, where a slew of new director candidates will be elected to the corporate board.

As Seeking Alpha noted, in its latest missive, Harvest, which owns as much as 9.3 percent of the firm, said on Monday (May 9) that it has delivered an open letter to Green Dot shareholders, which stated in part: “We have a high level of confidence that shareholders will see through the board’s last-ditch effort to combat widespread support for Harvest’s campaign and further entrench the destructive status quo.”

Harvest also took aim at CEO Steve Streit, lambasting his tenure as one marked by “fiefdom-like autocratic leadership.”

The battle, this time around, centers on a trio of nominees to the Green Dot board that Harvest has put forward, and the finger-pointing has gotten to a phase where Harvest has stated that Green Dot has stooped to providing “unflattering” pictures of those nominees in presentation materials, as well as parsing of social media posts that are taken out of context. Also, Harvest claims that legal actions against those nominees have been inflated in terms of importance. The nominees include Saturnino Fanlo, Philip Livingston and George Gresham. There are also assertions on both sides of this equation that claim credit for the 30 percent rise in the stock price in recent weeks. Perhaps predictably, Green Dot has said investors have been cheered by the recent establishment of an earnings per share target of $1.75, while the activist investor has said it is its own establishment of significant holdings in the name that have driven shares higher.