Valassis Investor Sues to Halt $1.84B Buyout

A Valassis Communications investor sued the board of the Livonia, MI-based store-coupon distributor, saying it unfairly favored a $1.84 billion takeover bid from a company controlled by billionaire Ronald Perelman and could have gotten more money.

Robert Mason and Robert Recchia, Valassis’s CEO and CFO, held secret talks with officials of Perelman’s Harland Clarke Holdings before Harland made its $34.02-a-share cash bid, and the directors abandoned a strategic review of alternatives, the investor, a Louisiana pension fund, said in a lawsuit filed yesterday in Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington.

“If the offer is completed, Valassis’s public shareholders will be frozen out in