Koito Says Pickens Will Lose Bid for Board Seats

Koito Manufacturing Co. said Wednesday that it is assured of defeating American investor T. Boone Pickens Jr.’s bid to win stockholder support today for seating himself and three of his representatives on the auto parts firm’s board.

Management, it said, has received 61.1% of the proxies of stockholders to vote against Pickens, Koito’s largest shareholder, and 52 other American shareholders planning to attend today’s meeting.

Pickens said Tuesday that he had received proxies amounting to about 1.4% of Koito’s stockholders.

“After Boone Pickens’ lengthy and highly visible campaign to attack Koito, disrupt our business and create controversy to further his greenmail scheme, it is revealing that he could obtain fewer than 2% of the other shareholders,” said Tomoatsu Aoyama, a Koito director.

In May, Pickens placed advertisements in Japanese newspapers and mailed a videotape appeal to more than 4,000 Koito stockholders. Pickens and Koito are reported to have spent more than $1.5 million each in the battle.

As a reason for rejecting Pickens’ bid for the board seats, Aoyama again charged that Pickens and Kitaro Watanabe, an auto dealer from whom Pickens bought the Koito shares, were engaged in a plot to coerce Koito into buying back the shares registered in Pickens’ name at an exorbitant price, a practice known as greenmail.

Pickens also “has a deserved reputation as a corporate raider” in the United States, Aoyama charged.

“Putting someone with this reputation on our board would be harmful to our relations with customers, employees and others,” he declared. “His own company, Mesa, lost more than $60 million last year, has stopped paying dividends and is selling at an all-time low. We have no reason to think he would produce better results at Koito.”

Pickens has denied that he is seeking to greenmail Koito but refuses to comment on whether he maintains a relationship with Watanabe.