Sotheby’s, hedgie Loeb continue their board battle

In the boardroom brawl between Dan Loeb and Sotheby’s, both are punching with panache.

Just hours after the auction house attacked the activist investor’s track record in a sleek PowerPoint presentation, Loeb launched a website with a Damien Hirst image of a pill-lined medicine cabinet to blast Sotheby’s poison-pill defense.

Loeb is waging a proxy fight to gain three seats on Sotheby’s board and has nominated himself and two other candidates ahead of the company’s annual meeting in May. He also has sued Sotheby’s over its poison pill.

The back and forth showed just how bitter the battle has become.

Loeb’s Third Point said the website is for “shareholders who support increased growth and a new agenda for Sotheby’s.” So far, it serves mostly as a repository for Loeb’s letters to the board.

The site was in response to Sotheby’s 41-page presentation on Tuesday that argued Loeb is only in it for the short term.

The billionaire hedgie stayed around a year or less on the boards of Yahoo!, Massey Energy, Pogo Producing and Enphase Energy and only two years on Ligand and Biofuel Energy.

During his tenure at Ligand and Biofuel, shares underperformed the S&P 500 index, while at Massey shares fell 30 percent.

“Mr. Loeb’s board experience highlights the short-term nature of his representation of shareholders as a director,” Sotheby’s said in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The giant auction house also called out what it described as Loeb’s “self-interested transaction with Yahoo!”

Loeb and two directors with Third Point ties left the board after Yahoo! agreed to repurchase about 40 million of his shares, giving him a windfall profit of more than $500 million, which critics called greenmail.