LIONS GATE BOARD BUTS HEADS WITH ICAHN AGAIN

The tug of war between the management and board of Lions Gate Entertainment on the one hand and maverick investor Carl Icahn on the other continued on Wednesday as the board urged shareholders to reject Icahn’s latest bid of $7 a share to buy the company — an amount that values the movie and TV studio at $825 million. Calling the new bid “financially inadequate, opportunistic and coercive,” the board asked shareholders instead to adopt a “poison pill” that could thwart Icahn’s take-over efforts. On Wednesday, Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer, whose management of the company has frequently been condemned by Icahn, insisted that Icahn’s latest bid “pales in comparison to the value inherent in the world-class platform we have established over the past 10 years.”