Boaz Weinstein Takes on BlackRock in Proxy Battle

You've been very vocal on Twitter, usually on how these battles are going. You've been pretty quiet. How have the meetings gone? Have you won anything? So it's always nice to aspire to break news at a conference like this. And it so happens that the fun that has gotten the most of my attention, which is called Big ZBIGZ, just had the voting closed at 11:00. So I can say preliminarily, I didn't, I didn't count the votes, but they've they've announced it that actually all the Saba nominees, there were seven got more votes than all of the BlackRock nominees. And four of our nominees got more than two times as many votes as BlackRock. So more than two to one. And when you win an election by two to one, the voters have spoken. You know, we all know landslide is like 60405842. If more than 2/3 voted one way, you know, BlackRock can no longer say. And that they purport to speak for the shareholder and try to create some divisions. The shareholder has spoken. We won. And what we, the reason that there's been litigation, it's been outward, it's us to them is because they have put in place election rules that would make Vladimir Putin blush. Now I want to read you BlackRock statement because of course they have fought back. They have not let you just attack their funds. They said that BlackRock and the funds boards remained focused on delivering value for all shareholders through concrete actions such as increased distributions and discount management programs. Saba as an activist hedge fund looking to arbitrage funds to capture quick profits. This attack is not about government's performance or discounts. It is about executing Saba's well known playbook, buying, controlling positions and forcing short term changes that harm retail investors to benefit Saba and its hedge fund investors. What is your response to that? And what what do you do after these campaigns? Yeah. You know, when I sit here and think, throw your best at me like they send you a question. Just please, like give me your toughest question. There's no, there's no, we're not. We're not. I'm not here to be to be. We don't have some friendly arrangement. Ask me anything you want. I fear none of their questions because they're so absurd, OK, When they say that we're using some purported playbook to help investors in the short term, where is the long term pain of making investors money? Usually when you say you have a short term motive, there's a long term consequence. Having the funds have investors have a chance to get out at full value. Where is that? Where is the negative in that? And I'm not going to use my words, OK ISS, which is independent, OK, which stands to tell the small investor how they should view this kind of rough contest that, you know, that that we're having. Here's what ISS said about about this year, OK? The board is deeply entrenched. A direct intervention remains necessary. It is rare to witness a board so brazenly flout the most basic of shareholder rights in furtherance of their own enrichment. I'll read one more. The board actions are so grave that they would warrant adverse vote for incumbents in an uncontested election. What ISS has said is that even if we didn't run against BlackRock, they would have recommended against their nominees. That is literally how bad it is. And I want to just say Black Rocks an amazing firm. They managed 10 1/2 trillion dollars by last account. This might be big to us. This might be very big to our investors. This is tiny small potatoes. And it's it'll someday be a case study at HBS of a strategy failure that for $5 billion of action of buying back funds at a discount, including their own employees who would get to make that money, including their shareholders, that they would say, look, we actually care about you. We're going to treat you the way other managers are treating their shareholders. They wouldn't have this problem on their hands. They have amazing products. But for closed end funds, they're, they basically have taken the position, no one is going to tell us what to do. And we're willing to do whatever it takes to squash share the the rights of the shareholder, which is enshrined in the 40 Act. The 40 Act is there, the 1940 act, the Investment Company Act is there to protect small investors. They don't need the same protections in ETFs because you can vote with your feet, you can redeem a mutual fund, you can sell an ETF at NAV, but they are violating the Investment Company Act. Don't trust my words. A judge said it last year and we won our case.