A true power struggle has arisen at Harley-Davidson. The second largest shareholder has declared the outgoing CEO Jochen Zeitz war. The shareholder demands significant changes in leadership: the departure of three members of the Board of Directors, including current President Jochen Zeitz.
The shareholder in question is H Partners, which has 9.1% of the Harley-Davidson shares and is therefore the second largest shareholder. H Partners was represented on the Harley-Davidson board by Jared Dourdeville, who recently announced his resignation.
On his departure, he threw a metaphorical hand grenade and focused specifically on board members Jochen Zeitz (CEO and chairman), Thomas Linebarger (chairing director) and Sara Levinson (director for 29 years).
Dourdeville said that these board members were wrong the company; Harley-Davidson fired back by saying that Linebarger misunderstood his actions on the board and the position of the Moco in the industry.
However, it did not stop with some accusations. On April 16, H Partners sent an email to media and shareholders in which they say they do not give up, they insist on changes in the Board of Directors, including the exclusion of Zeitz, Linebarger and Levinson of re -election and Zeitz ‘immediate removal as CEO.
We originally discussed in 2021 with the leadership and the board of directors of the company (the “council”) about worrying with regard to the remuneration of directors, corporate governance and the composition of the board of directors. One of our directors, Jared Dourdeville, joined the Board of Directors in February 2022 as a result of a cooperation agreement with the company. Since then we have worked constructively to support Harley-Davidson.
In the past year, however, it has become increasingly clear to us that there were major problems with implementation, under the supervision of an absent CEO; that the CEO and the chairman of the board of directors have not been completely transparent with the rest of the board of directors; And that certain board members with a long track record were not prepared to hold the CEO responsible for the serious value destruction and cultural exhaustion of this iconic American company.
We are not the only stakeholders who have noticed these problems: the mood among dealers is at a low point in ten years; And in the late summer of 2024 a large association of dealers wrote a letter in which they canceled their confidence in management and in fact called for the resignation of CEO Zeitz because of “mismanagement of the brand” and “the destruction of the profitability of dealers”.
In the email, Jochen Zeitz is taken hard. According to H Partners, Zeitz spends much more time in New Mexico, the United Kingdom and a turbulent Kenya instead of the Moco headquarters in Milwaukee, the factories or the dealers. H Partners says he is convinced that absent leadership does not serve the company, certainly not at a critical moment like now.
To reinforce the coup, H Partners has launched a new website, Freetheaggle.com, where their side of the story is explained and the state of affairs can be read through updates. We are curious how the Moco will respond to this, but this will be a little more with mud in the coming period.
– Thanks for information from Motorfreaks.