Edge to Activists in PHH Proxy Battle

Activist shareholders appear to have won the proxy fight at the mortgage outsourcer PHH Corp.

According to the preliminary results of a vote at PHH's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, both of Pennant Capital Management LLC's nominees, Gregory J. Parseghian and Allan Z. Loren, were elected to the board. They had run against PHH's chief executive officer, Terence W. Edwards, and its chairman, Alvin B. Krongard. (Pennant had said it did not intend to remove Edwards as CEO, just from the board.)

James O. Egan was also re-elected to the board, according to the preliminary results, which PHH said are subject to certification in the next few days. (He ran unopposed.) All three are to serve three-year terms; PHH staggers elections to its seven-seat board.

Pennant, which owns 9.94% of PHH, has complained that the Mount Laurel, N.J., company has been too slow to reduce mortgage production costs during the housing downturn and that it spends too much to keep its private-label customers happy. Those customers include Charles Schwab Corp.'s bank subsidiary, Allstate Corp., BankAtlantic Bancorp Inc., Comerica Inc., Northern Trust Corp. and Popular Inc.'s Banco Popular.

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